Senior citizen are complaining.

Hmm, not really, actually they are bitching about almost everything.

For starters they are constantly complaining about the younger generation. They don’t like the way the younger generation communicates, acts, thinks, behaves, dresses, looks, and talks.

Next, they are complaining about TV programs, music, fashion trends, hair styles, body art, loss of honor, respect tradition, and face book.

While the older women complain about the present mindset of teenage girls that “making it to graduation without being pregnant” spells success, it seems that men over seventy have to pull up their pants until they hit the armpits, and then complain about the government, full time.

Being over eighty years old myself, enables me to understand the viewpoints on a lot of these things. What I mean is that I understand how the viewpoints of us older folks developed, and why.

Our viewpoints have their roots in a mindset which was gradually acquired by us during our lifetime of experiences. And, none of our experiences produced a mindset that included “texting” during the family Thanksgiving dinner. It also did not include piercing our lips, and eyebrows, and tongues.

Neither do we understand why a loud noise, consisting of banging on guitars and drums is supposed to be music.

However, while I do understand the origins of our mindset, I don’t understand the bitching which goes on among us older folk about the generation gap, and the apparent disconnect with a lot of the current ways, and of life in general.

First of all, let’s be a bit honest about it.

We, as the “older generation” do not have an “exclusive”  on being right on a lot of things. While our mindset was being formed by our elders, we learned to accepted a few things as being right, when in reality some of them were so wrong and ill conceived that they make us shudder where we dare to think back.

And, I am not only talking about the mindset of not too recent times, that a specific portion of our citizens was supposed to sit in the back of the bus, or was not fit to hold a public office, or be part of a management team.

Remember? That was our “older” generation . . . .  and it isn’t that long ago.

Please, allow me to cite a different example from Germany. You know, of course, that  Germany is the country which produced great minds such as Goethe, Schiller, and Albert Einstein. Moreover, German products were recognized all over the world as superior, and German engineers were sought out by international companies to improve their machinery.

And still, from 1936 until about 1947 the German school system decided that left handed children were “Idiots”. Period.

Unless these “Morons” were corrected to write right handed, and use their right hand for things like throwing a ball, they were considered too stupid to learn, and were therefore pronounced “Idiots”. In order to “teach” them, the children were forced to hold out their left hand, and the teacher hit the “bad” hand with a willow stick so that the hand would bleed and swell up, therefore unable to hold a pen. Talking about “teaching to an extreme”.

The subject of the disconnect between us older folks (we are always right)  and the younger generation (which is always wrong) is far too extensive to discuss in a single post. However, as we grow older, we cannot simply assume that we know it all, and just because of the fact that we are older, we have somehow acquired the right to stop learning.

We have to recognize that this is exactly the mindset which produced the “disconnect” in the first place.

In summation, it becomes clear that we have a challenge on our hand, and it is also clear that “bitching” is not the answer

If we choose to set an example, we need to do better.