Senior pushes suicide jumper in south China

[katiuska]

Originally Posted by Smarty McBarrelpants

It's harder to tell where white people come from? I'm not even sure what you are getting at there when your next statement is that you can't even boil black people past Africa which is far larger than say Europe.

...I have a whole spiel on this, but it's straying too far off topic. Actually, this is probably what that thing I was going to do is for, so I'm taking it there.

Anyway, ageism.

Originally Posted by Rejected Again

Bit you don't live in Iowa do you? Once you come here you suddenly realize those cliches are true. I live in a small community here are I swear that they all act in one of those 3 manners.

How small are we talking? I'll grant that the bigger cities are a bit different, but my only "get off my lawn" incident involved a guy probably in his mid-thirties. There was a park, and I was sidling around the fence looking for the entrance. He happened to live to one side of said fence and did not like me going through the edge of his property. This was in Ames.

We've addressed the issue of ageism in class a bit. It can go either way, but U.S. culture prizes youth. Senior citizens have a disturbingly high rate of depression, because hey, being old here sucks. Offhand I'd say that old folks are entitled to a certain amount of respect, to the extent that age implies a decades-long record of adding to the community. The classes were instructive, though. When asked, all of us admitted we'd want a counselor no older than middle age, because anyone older would be too "out of touch" with our needs. "There aren't universal truths about some things?" the professor asked. "Like love?"

My instinct is to say yes and no. The fundamental experiences are probably the same, but context can change. I've noticed this even with my parents, who are not elderly but left the dating scene some 30 years ago. It applies doubly to my dad as a man who grew up in a more traditional and patriarchal country. I find his opinions vis-a-vis men and women quaint. For example, a few years ago he said that staying over at a male friend's house was disrespectful to my then-boyfriend... whereas I saw it as not in any way different from staying with a female friend--the fact that said friend was a previous boyfriend notwithstanding (Dad didn't know this part, he would have disapproved even more). (We dated briefly at the beginning but both agreed that it didn't work, and we've stayed as friends for years now, so he's fundamentally a friend to me. So yes, cross-sex friendships can exist and be just like same-sex friendship, though it can be harder. In that case it helped that there were no regrets on either side.)

When my then-boyfriend and I had to do the long-distance thing for a while (well, sort of long-distance, we were 2 hours apart) both my parents were concerned, because were coming from an expectation that the boy travels to the girl. In that context, making her travel means something bad. In our context, I drove there, because I had a car, he didn't, and it was that simple. In turn, he paid for most meals.

...Holy shit I write too much. What I'm saying is that they don't quite get that we do things differently then they did. But if I were to ask them a question like, "What characterizes a loving relationship?" I'd have a good chance of getting an answer that could apply to me as well as them. So basically, I feel conditionally justified in preferring a younger person's opinion... but maybe there's covert ageism that I can't see as well because I can't step outside myself?