[juju]

Originally posted by MaggieL
What an idiot. Why didn't he just come right out and say "I've been dissing you because I thought you were a sprout."
:-)

Well, I don't really mind. People can think what they want of me I suppose. I just don't want respect soley because i'm older. It just seems like a silly reason to me.

There's plenty of reason to expect an older person to be acting from a larger experience base than a younger one. There's no guarantee of better judgement from an older person, of course...there are elderly idiots and boy geniuses.

That said, there are nuances of life and human behavior that are very difficult to pick up on unless you've simply been around people for a long time. Again, being older is certainly no guarantee of this...some folks are simply paying more attention than others. But expecting someone, say, under twenty, to understand some issues in the same depth and way most forty year olds do is just not smart, no matter how much it appeals to someone's sense of egalitarianism.

Agreed. Many older people do know more. But it's just... do they have to act so smug about it? Do they have to treat younger people like they're so inferior? That's what really bothers me. I know that most of them do know a lot. But I don't think that gives them the right to treat people the way they do.

Ther are some life expereinces that are transformative. One is having and raising children. Another is losing friends and family --especially parents-- to death. There are a lot of others. For me learning to fly an airplane turned me into a very different person, because it required me to come to grips with fear, courage and self-confidence in very different ways. And if I'd learned to fly at 16, as some people do, it would have affectied me very differently than it did happening when I was 35.

I do recognize this, and whenever I meet an older person I make it a point to pay attention and try to soak up any lessons they might have learned. Some weren't paying attention. But I get excited when I find someone who was paying attention, because I have the chance to learn some things without having to spend 50 years doing it.

That said, even though I always make it a point to learn as much as I can from older people, I still give them the same respect as I would a 10 year old.

You might want to explore with yourself why this is such a hot-button issue for you. The answer might be interesting.

Ah, I promise I will. :)