Thursday, September 22, 2005

Thanks to Anonymous who posts the following in response to the yearning for fame I mused about:

"Emotional and intellectual maturity should eventually kick in but for some reason this has not happened to far too many. Will the tide turn, will we learn what is important, did 9/11 give us a clue, Katrina show us how immune we've become to our fellow humans? Answers?"


Wondering if our national obsession with youth is coming back to bite us. When you sequester all your old people and ignore what they have to say, and believe that your parents are "like stupid" well into your 30s (because of course you have now people in their late 20s behaving like teens - because our country has such a lust for youth and all that is pretty), and most of what is "wowed" on TV is youth, beauty and wealth its pretty simple to lose perspective. Life is long and hard. We will all grow old if we are so lucky. Funnily enough, time and gravity works the same on everyone.

Question arises, is anyone growing old gracefully anymore?

When you spend alot of time alone, watching TV or going to movies, which I think a disproportionate number of Americans now do (I think it was my mom who noticed the statistic that now more than half of all Americans are single and live alone!!), you start to believe that the only interesting/important/worthy people are young and pretty and reeeeely reeely famous! No wonder all the old people tend to congregate together. Its probably less we shooed them away than that they just couldn't stand young people anymore. Which reminds me of the marker of adulthood I noticed I'd hit several years ago; You know you're old when 20-somethings start to irritate you.

So, what ever happened to Mike Douglas? (I don't mean him in particular, I mean his ilk.) What ever happened to talking to people who have actually accomplished something in their life, or have something interesting to say? Where are all the Nobel Prize winners being interviewed these days? Probably only in print, in small circulation magazines... because really who cares about science when
BritneeeSpeeers just had a baybeeeee! Uh mu God!

1 comment:

ElleDee said...

Don't know about you but our local Bay Area news has more and more news pieces that are worthy of "Entertainment Tonight." When did Paris Hilton's dog and Brad's affair with Angelina become newsworthy? I'm not going to lie, I read "People" and check out the celebrity gossip. But everything has its place.
I watch the news to know what's really going on locally and nationally - there is very little international news. (I acknowledge the media bias and slanted reporting but that's an entirely different and lengthy discussion.)
It appears we will have to look towards PBS and NPR to find those Nobel Prize winner interviews. But hey, Britney had a C-section. I'm sure you were dying to find out that little fact!!