I’ve always been able to evaluate myself objectively, see myself as others see me. I always felt I could make corrections, adjustments to make up for it. But seeing it, even understanding it, doesn’t mean you can stop it.

I’ve compiled an inventory of personal traits and attitudes and I monitor them constantly. There’s no denying there’s something going on (and not all of it is negative, there are good aspects to aging!). But there is no question I am changing. And there is no doubt that there is little I can do about it.

Even though I’m an old fart my wife still laughs at me all the time and says I act like a little boy. And she says I better never change.

Even when you catch yourself doing it, and you tell yourself; “Stop doing that, you’re acting like an old fart again.”, you keep doing it. The problem is hardware, not software.

You can change how you act and speak, and edit what you write, but you can’t change how you think. Unfortunately, that is out of one’s control. Its a bitter realization I keep catching myself running up against more and more often these days.

And believe me, some day you’ll find that out for yourself.

Think young bro. Don’t be like DonOLD.

And why is the image of the candidate communicated by those film clips so different from the impression and image of her which existed before she became the Presidential contender? Is that really her, or is it just clever editing? And if it IS her, why should it matter?

It may very well be true what you say about the “young vote”, but why should that be important, and why should I be concerned about it, and why do I don’t understand what that all means? I know the subtle ways culture affects how you perceive the world, I grew up biculturally; but why would the young have a different culture than their elders? Should they? Is the world changing so fast now that children are as different from their parents as Irishmen are from Iroquois?

Yes, I recognized when I was young how my views and assumptions differed from my parents’; but I always understood that to be a temporary condition caused by abrupt and profound social changes and historical circumstances. It never occurred to me that this schism between generations, what we used to call the counter-culture; is now permanent and constant? We now have the Greatest Generation, the Boomers, the Millennials, the X,Y and Z cohorts, all coexisting in one place at the same time yet incapable of understanding one another. Can a stable society exist if fractured into tribes determined by age? Can we survive as a species if the oldest siblings in a family are incapable of making any sense of the younger ones?

It used to be that the world our grandparents grew up in didn’t differ that much from the one our grandchildren had to deal with. Now in one lifetime the world becomes unrecognizable.

Is a puzzlement.