MB, isn't every blog for lifelong experience? I sure slurped up the 1st-hand FDR Democrat account. There's something about witnessing history, especially before the advent of TV, that can't be conveyed but by the anecdotes & footnotes that give cultural context. Everything changes simultaneously, and influences everything else, but our records typically are restricted by discipline, so the influence of, e.g., art on politics, can often be overlooked. I never read of Marion Anderson in any history textbook I had, but such figures give inspiration momentum.

Isn't part of the American loss of community related to the segregation by age that seems predominant here? The kids get shipped off to pre-school & the folks off to retirement communities. And everybody wanders around in our respective age bubbles (caveatesque: I'm unsure to what extent my life experience is biased by how phobic Californians tend to be about aging).

For much of my childhood & teenage years, I lived in the same house with my grandparents, both active members of the household. Whereas I love to pet my grandma's soft skin, and we often lounge draped around each other, most of my friends grandparents get a cursory upper-half non-contact hug on the way in and the way out, if that. We all need contact!

In comparison with my own experience, the relationships most of my friends had with their grandparents seemed so stiff & distant, and many of them even seemed scared of old people. It's so sad. Instead of the case of Vietnamese elders who have stature and who contribute to maintain the social fabric, we have devalued an important resource here.

Maybe the best aspect of it is that, as with the tomato, current generations just don't know what they're missing. Me, however, I suffer because I have lived for over a decade on the east coast apart from my grandparents; I've missed them profoundly. Letters and phone calls are wonderful treats, but in many respects, meager substitute.

If we don't cultivate interactions that transcend generations, we lose our sense of our own history, of our own selves, and we will have no gauge for which aspects of existence have truly changed, and which have remained the same, over recent history.

Isolating and devaluing our elders has some unhealthy self-loathing aspects to it, as well, since eventually, if we're each lucky enough to, we'll be old someday too, right?

Ah well, as the Boomers get on, advertisers and Hollywood will presumably cater more to that demographic, and that might reshape the aging stigma outlook somewhat, hopefully?