The Elderly - Author unknown

[surfered]

We were born in the 40s-50s-60s.
We grew up in the 50's-60's-70's
We studied in the 60s-70s-80s.
We were together in the 70s-80s-90s.
We got married or not and discovered the world in the 70s-80s-90s.
Adventuring into the 80s - 90s
We're settling in to the 2000s.
We became wiser in 2010s.
And we’re going strong into 2020 and beyond.
Turns out we went through EIGHT different decades...

TWO different centuries...
TWO different millennials...

We've gone from phone with operator for long distance calls, pay booths, video calls worldwide.

We’ve gone from slides to YouTube, vinyls to online music, handwritten letters to emails and Whats App.

Live games on the radio, black and white TV, color TV, then HD 3D TV.

We went to the video store and now watching Netflix.

We've known the first computers, punch cards, disks and now we have gigabytes and megabytes on our smartphones.

We wore shorts all through our childhood, then trousers, ep pants or mini-skirts, Oxfords, Clarks, Palestinian scarves, jumpsuits, and blue jeans.

We avoided childhood paralysis, meningitis, poliomyelitis, tuberculosis, swine flu and now COVID-19.

We've done roller skating, roller skating, tricycle, bicycle, moped, gasoline or diesel and now we drive hybrids or electric.
We played with the little ones
horses and checkers, ostrich and marbles, 1000 threshold and monopoly, now there's candy crush on our smartphones
And we read... much
And our schoolmates religion was not a subject...
We used to drink tap water and lemonade in glass bottles, and the vegetables on our plate were always fresh, today we get meals delivered
Yes, we have been through a lot but what a beautiful life we have had!

They might describe us as “ex-annuals”; people who were born in this 50s world, who had an analog childhood and digital adulthood.
We should add the Biological Revolution that we have witnessed. In 1960, biology was very descriptive. We have witnessed the event of Molecular Biology: the molecules of Life have been discovered: DNA, RNA etc. When you see everything that has come from it: gene therapy, gene fingerprints, and others the progress is considerable.

We kind of have "seen it all"!

Our generation has literally lived and witnessed more than any other in every dimension of life.
This is our generation that has literally adapted to "CHANGE".

A big congratulations to all the members of a very special generation, which will be UNIQUE.. "

[EarnestPutz]

1. Thanks for this post. I like it, if I'm allowed to be a little self-congratulatory. Particularly the part about our...

.....schoolmates religion not being a subject (of any concern).

[Faux pas]

2. K n R

[captain queeg]

3. Very good

[doc03]

4. We have also ran up a debt that can't be sustained. The next generation will probably not have

SS or Medicare. Few of the next generation will ever be able to retire with any dignity, most will work until
they are dead or disabled. The Boomer generation has pretty much fucked up the country for future generations.

[jmbar2]

8. That can be remedied by revising that tax structure for the rich and corporations

Buffet says Berkshire is in the top 800 companies in the US.

...we sent in over $5 billion last year [in taxes]. If 800 companies had done the same thing, no other person in the United States would have had to pay a dime of federal taxes, whether income taxes, no social security taxes, no estate taxes...

[doc03]

11. I agree but we have been going in the opposite direction for

over a half century. I don't see it changing for the better.The Republicans get elected and give tax cuts tax cuts to the rich
and drive up the debt. When Democrats gain power and try to raise taxes they get voted out and it is more tax cuts for the rich
and more debt. It has been the same in my entire lifetime. Nothing will change unless we could get a super majority in congress
and that will never happen. Maybe it will change when we are dead and gone.

[flashman13]

17. Wait just a minute. There is no problem with SS or Medicare/cade. It only takes the will

of voters, via the Congress, to not only continue to fund both, but to actually improve the system.

How you ask? Make the rich people that own the vast majority of the country's wealth pay their fair share. Raise the maximum income on which social security is levied from the current $168,600 to say a nice round number like $1,000,000. Problem solved.

Vote BLUE!

[dchill]

22. The no tax for me billionaires did that.

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

27. BS. Don't fucking blame all Boomers for the evil

shit Republican Boomers did.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

5. Also the first generation to both clip glurge out and put it on the fridge with magnets, and to share it via email.

[EarnestPutz]

28. Glurge? Help me out with this please.

[H2O Man]

6. We watched

Winnie the Pooh and Eeyore. We didn't create either character, and thus deserve neither credit nor blame. Yet we recognized both as human potentials. And our generation produced both types.

[EarnestPutz]

29. Waterman! What an insight! Nicely done, my man, nicely done.

[H2O Man]

30. Thank you!

Much appreciated!

[EarnestPutz]

31. You're welcome. Any mention of Winnie the Pooh just makes me happy.

[young_at_heart]

7. Did anyone else read "The Bobsey Twins"?

I remember listening to radio soap operas after school, "Portia Faces Life" and "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon" were a couple of my favorites. In 1950 my parents bought a strange new thing called a television and I really loved "Beany and Cecil"!

[Tree Lady]

13. Yep in second grade

And Nancy Drew.

I still send cards but only one friend and I do this. My mom use to but she died last year at 96.

[ShazzieB]

18. I read one Bobbsey Twins book.

Just the one, and a few Nancy Drews. But Trixie Belden was my favorite, hands down. Still love Trixie.

[PatSeg]

20. Yes, my sister and I read The Bobbsey Twins

and after that we moved on to Nancy Drew.

We listened to My Friend Irma and The Shadow Knows on the radio before we got the first TV on the block. Later my sister and I rushed home from school to watch Flash Gordon serial episodes and the original Mickey Mouse Club.

We loved Beany and Cecil as well!

[StarryNite]

9. This is great! Thank you for sharing.

[PeaceWave]

10. I take issue with the definition of "elderly."

A car isn't ready for the scrap heap so long as it still looks good and drives well. Similarly, you aren't "elderly" so long as you're still fully functioning both physically and mentally. Continuing with the car analogy, I would suggest that you're only "elderly" once parts start failing and/or falling off and once the cost of repairs exceeds the benefit gained.

[Gaugamela]

12. What a long strange trip it's been!

[Tikki]

14. And as one of the "Elderly"...I can't wait to, hopefully, see the...

wondrous changes and adaptations all generations, now and in the future, will achieve.


Tikki

[sarchasm]

15. 1974 ✊

It wasn't until 1974, when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed, that women in the U.S. were granted the right to open a bank account on their own. Technically, women won the right to open a bank account in the 1960s, but many banks still refused to let women do so without a signature from their husbands.

how far we have come

[DavidDvorkin]

16. No wonder we're so tired.

[FuzzyRabbit]

21. My grandmother saw incredible fundamental changes during her lifetime.

She was born in 1891 and died in 1964.

When she was born personal transportation was by horse. She witnessed the introduction of the internal combustion engine and automobiles.

When she was a girl, it took a whole day's work to feed yourself. By the end of her life, with industrial farming it took only a couple hours worth of labor (or less) to feed yourself.

In the early 20th century she experienced the first public electricity and the appliances that we still use to this day: refrigerators instead of ice to preserve our food, washing machines (still the greatest labor saving device ever invented) that saved one or two days of hard labor hand washing clothes.

Women got the vote 10 years after she became an adult.

Electronic communications and entertainment: The widespread use of telephones in nearly every home. The advent of record players, radio, then TV, then color TV.

She witnessed the invention of the airplane, then passenger aircraft, then jet passenger aircraft. When she was a young mother, it took a full two weeks to travel from her home in Fairbanks, Alaska to Seattle. By the end of her life you could have breakfast in one city and eat lunch 4-1/2 hours later in the other.

Traditional jazz, the big band era, and rock'n'roll.

And the bad: the atomic bomb.

I wish I could live to see what changes happen in the next century. Maybe we will yet see everyone traveling to work in flying cars and our housework done by robot maids.

[surfered]

24. As a young boy, my grandfather traveled by covered wagon from Texas to Oklahoma

But lived to see a man walk on the moon.

[hunter]

19. I got the mumps before there was a mumps vaccine. Mumps bad.

Went to the hospital for that.

Very severe chickenpox too.

And asthma... some doctors were still blaming my mom and her "smothering" personality for that, and all the now-called autistic spectrum stuff too.

I was maybe fortunate to have a mom who'd go full-on Berserker in my defense, but all in all, I'd rather have skipped those parts.

I ran away from my mom (and my grandmom too...) in their Berserker rolls by becoming a semi-homeless person living out of a P.O. box for several years. I think my crazy grandma saw me as a kindred spirit and sent a hundred dollars a month to that post office box, which sort of tethered me in place, even when I was living in my broken car in a church parking lot. Conniving bitches, I was near ready to walk to Alaska. (I can say that because that's what they called themselves, and I was clearly a dumpster diving son of a bitch.)

As a young adult too many friends died of AIDS and suicide and I'll never get over that. Ronald Reagan is burning in hell. In my later work I witnessed our hemophilia patients dying of AIDS.

As for my privileges, I witnessed the births of BSD and the World Wide Web.

I've been on the internet since the later 'seventies. There are even naked pics, as I was briefly someone's Lenna. We don't talk about that because she'd hunt me down and kill me. I once saw her handcuff a pimp to a urinal and beat the hell out of him. We broke up when I jumped out of her moving car.

When I was a kid we had a five digit telephone number, starting with either a five or a seven, and it was a party line. Long distance calls meant someone in close family had died, or my mom's work, or just my grandmas being queen bitches. My grandmas had the money to call long distance. My parents, artists with day jobs, did not.

[Codifer]

23. Should also mention

that we were handed the knowledge and lessons that our elders learned by living through world wars and economic collapse and epidemics and variable moral codes. Our parents were time machines giving us some often bitterly earned insights.

In my own circumstance... I was born in 1944, my father was born in 1902 and his father (whom I never knew) was born in 1857.

That is a lot of accumulated experience (for good or bad).

Change happens at an ever quickening pace. My father 's early life was not that much different that his father's experience. Horse and buggy for travel, 6 day work weeks for little pay and almost constant darkness. Get up before dawn, walk to the mine in the dark and work in the dark until sundown and then walk home. My father knew the sky before it was filled with airplanes and lived to see some folks walk on the moon on a TV right there in the living room. He raised a family during the depression and sent a son to WW II and another (me) to Vietnam. He loved Roosevelt and he passed that love down. My father and brother could safely talk about the politics of the time. My father and I could only safely talk about baseball. ... and that was ok.

[B.See]

25. Great essay. And that didn't even cover

the myriad evolutions of music we've witnessed.

Interestingly I just saw a report on CBS's Weekend News broadcast about a poll that showed nearly 90% of those 65 or older plan on voting this November, compared to 30% of those classified as young voters.

It's almost as if we boomers are more worried about the future than they are.

Why is that?

[surfered]

26. Yes, we bought vinyl, then 8 track, then cassette, then CD

I bought the same album 4 times!

[B.See]

32. Well actually I was speaking of the evolution of genres, but yes

evolutions in formats as well.

[surfered]

33. Yes, many genres in a relative short amount time.

My father was immersed in the Big Band period of music and was disheartened by Rock & Roll.