Worst Fear : Loss of freedoms or covid19

a reply to: burdman30ott6

Felt like that wasASL on AOL long ago.... I feel violated, I love it...

a reply to: AutomateThis1

I have find you a thoughtful person from other posts of yours so no, I do not take your questions here as an attack, just questions that, through clarification could help you in your own understanding of our human condition. So I will attempt to take some of your questions one at a time.

It's my understanding that you're not an US citizen, so your views on personal freedoms and such are likely much different than the average US citizen.

Well, I am a citizen, but yes, my views on much of everything are likely not much like the average US citizen. I don't know how my views stack up against those of other people around the world as I have never lived in a culture or society apart from the American culture and so have never had the opportunity to assimilate through osmosis if you will, the nuances of culture and thought from other societies.

And average? Well who wants to be considered average. I know that in some ways I am average though in general consider myself in some aspects above average and in some aspects below, but what does above or below mean anyway.

Do you think it would be unjust for me to consider you to be selfish?

No, not unjust but rather reasonable to assume this as much of what I am capable of putting down in typed words, just as other folks, can easily be understood in that vein.

I know that my mother always accused me of being selfish when I didn''t want to share a toy or when I would take too many meatballs with my spaghetti. She of course was a child of the great depression of the 30s where resources were so tight that everyone had to share and share alike. So my whole life has been a struggle for me to live up to her standards of unselfishness and to define for myself just what was selfish and what was not. Here is an example of what might be considered selfish .

I am a large man, tall and wide like an old football player. When I go to a movie I like to get there early. This from one point of view would be so that I could get the best seat in the house. But from my point of view it's because I hate to come in after others are seated and either have to slide in right next to someone else who would be forced to sit next to or behind me and hence not have the enjoyable experience they had hoped for due to my presence. I don't do ''blockbusters'' and I suppose that would make me ''not average'', so most of any movies I see in a theater are where the house is not full. So anyone that would come in late to a move that would likely fill the house and as a last resort either have to sit next to or behind me, well then that's their own damn fault for not planning ahead.

I hear many older people deride younger people under the assumption that they think younger people don't care about putting older people in jeopardy.

Myself, I don't deride the younger generations, as generations, for anything. To me we are all in this plight called modern civilization together. I do know that it is common for members of a generation that sees newer generations coming up behind them as not living up to the standards that their own generation has held to or so they believe. Hence the easy way for older people to deride the music of younger people.Or the culture or the approach to life.

I think we find ourselves in a unique situation. It has only been in the last century where a culture for one generation was NOT shared by the next generation. This basically went on for thousands of years, one generation basically living in the same culture as the previous generation. Now however we find that things seem to be changing so fast that the society that each generation grows into becomes isolated from previous generations and following generations. This is an entirely new experience for all of us.

You may not recall except from general reference a rallying cry of some of my generation when we were young. ''Never trust anyone over 30''. The basic intent of that ''meme'' was that ours was a ''new generation'', a generation that was going to change the world. That in order to do that, the culture and thinking of the older generation had to be replaced by people who would grow up with out own experiences. This ''meme'' was very radical and seen as very selfish even though the essence of the concept did have stuff to consider. I considered it for a short while but realized that it was not a cry that I wanted to rally behind. It among many other things prompted me to not trust to much in my own generation.

So, no, I say let younger generations deal with the problems their generations have to deal with, even as too many of those problems are the result of generations before them, just as the problems of my generation were problems of generations before mine and on infinitum.

This generational issue is important though for a number of reasons. I am younger then Trump by a year which makes me younger than both Biden and Sanders. All three, to my mind, cannot have the mental acuity to lead this or any nation at this point. I know how my own intellect is slowing and take that as a general assumption of others of my age. I know that I saw it in my parents and an uncle as well. He was the smartest man I ever knew, the most open to information and changes that he saw around him, yet as he approached the age I have now achieved slid as well into being of lesser mental capacity himself. I look at Trump and see oh so many of those signs. Trump is a product of one aspect of my generation. Biden another aspect and Sanders yet another, all products of the boomer generation. And for whatever inglorious reasons believe that it is they who can best lead the nation. I will vote for none of them.

Instead of try to help preserve what rights we as people across the world struggle to maintain you're willing to say screw everyone because you're worried? You've already outlived many and avoided a vast array of potential life ending scenarios. How many years do you think you have left? Don't take this the wrong way please as I do hope you live as long as you're enjoying life. It's a terrible way to go out from suffering. But, are you certain this is the right mindset? Screw the younger generations because of selfishness?

This may be too much to chew off at once but I will give it a try. Did you notice my comment '' For the last 40 years I have held that concern and at this point find that it is much to late to really rectify the problems we have dug for ourselves'' ?
I think that there is little I, or you can do at this point to preserve much of anything on a global level. I will try to explain my position here.

In my youth as a teenager I read a report from one of the early think tanks. Not a think tank as we know them that center around a specific agenda, but rather a grouping of intellects from a broad spectrum of studies to cross reference those studies for a better view of our human condition.

This report was written in the mid 60s when I was in my late teens. It was a multi pronged report describing our society at that point and projecting forward to the year 2000. It laid out a graph from ''now'' to a number of potential possibilities we might reach by the year 2000. The year 2000 was a scale of social conditions we would find ourselves in ranging from complete fascist dictatorship to a utopian vision of peace.

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a reply to: AutomateThis1

The other axis of the graph described the actions that would be needed to achieve any of the futures one chose to have in 2000. If what we wanted to have in 2000 was complete facist dictatorship, we needed to do nothinging. Change nothing, just cruise along with the flow of the past and that was what we would end up with. However in order to achieve that promising future more towards a utopian future, the changes we would need to make were changes that needed to be taken right away and that the changes that we would need to keep making along the way to assure that we would not slide into that future that hardly any of us would like to see.

Well, I began to watch as much of what I saw around me and study as much of what I could about societies and all of that and act and move my own life in the direction to what I saw as a preferable future. Much of what I saw going on around me did not. Enough so that as 2000 arrived, we had not fallen into dictatorship but only forestalled it by a couple of decades or so.

So loss of rights? Well sure. But at this point those rights that we still believe we may have are the last vestiges of freedoms we once thought we had. That this falls on us and effects generations younger than me is just a matter of timing. I almost did not have children because I saw where we were headed. I told my children that they not feel obligated to have children of their own just so continue the family line. They have not. My adopted children have and those grandchildren have had children. My wife and I now do what we can to help support those younger families. One of those things is to maintain our families homestead for fall back purposes.

There is noting I can do for future generations, that is all up to you at this point. You figure out what to do for the following generations as you are much closer to them than I. I would only attempt to help them in accordance with the standards of my upbringing which at this point are antiquated, hence the foolishness of voting for any of the leading candidates in November.

So basically I guess it a fair assumption in considering me to be sitting on a deck chair of the Titanic and sipping a mint julep, sucking on a pipe filled with maui-wowie and holding a remote flipping between Netflix and Hulu while the world goes to crap around me. What else am I going to do other than just stay out of the way of historical blunders that now seem to be calling all of this to a screeching halt? Any suggestions?

a reply to: TerryMcGuire

Thanks. I really appreciate you taking the time to respond. Honestly, I really can't fault ya for thinking in that manner.

I'm curious about how the world will look forty years from now when I'm in my seventies.

Yeesh, I just got a shiver. That's not that far off lol.

a reply to: AutomateThis1

If anything, I see that the complexity of our social development is beyond what most if any of us can determine. We can speculate sure, but one thing that should be expected is more and more ''Black Swans'', those events and game changers that seem to come out of left field and upset everybodies apple carts.

So cheers to you Auto.

COV-19 of course. You can't fight to restore your freedom when you are sick or dead.