"Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72"
- Mark Twain
It's interesting living in the human equivalent of the fabled "elephant graveyard." My town is a place where the climate is, by any Canadian standard, idyllic. It's as though there was a by-law prohibiting extreme weather, cold or hot. Places like mine are magnets for the geriatric set and not just my fellow British Columbians either. Geezers from Saskatchewan, geezers from Ontario and the dreaded Alberta geezers descend on us in swarms like locusts. Unfortunately they bring their half-assed ways and attitudes with them. Stephen Harper thanks them for that.
The trouble with old people is their insatiable urge to remake the very world they're so soon to depart. Can there be a greater conceit in human nature than for those nearing the close of life to demand that it be restored as it was when they found it?
Recently our community paper printed letters advocating the reinstatement of our schools of the Lord's Prayer and the daily singing of both "Oh Canada" and "God Save the Queen." They wanted public education reset to what they recalled as the good old days.
The Lord's Prayer, really? Surely the religious youth is not so lacking in opportunity to recite that mantra that they need another chance, this time out loud at school. But these crotchety old farts aren't worried about the religious youth. Rather they're after the kids who don't recite their prayer enough or at all for whatever reason.
Societies change, civilizations evolve. We should still be living in sod huts with hard packed dirt floors if every generation of old fogies was allowed to reset society to the backward state in which, in their own youth, they had found it.
Screw old people.
