Tag Archives: Seniority

Time Hobbles On

Getting at a certain age one has had enough time to become purely energetically efficient.

Over the years, some have learned to hold their tongues a bit more while others, on the contrary, are now not shy about saying what is on their tongues.

With age has come the understanding that it is better to say how things are and that there is no longer any reason to hide things or withhold truth.

 

+

Preceding

A culture of “democratic cleansing” – Elders and youngsters versus respect

A more recent discrimination: Old Age

A Cranky Old Man

Readers, likes and comments

Archon's Den

Growing “Older”
How many do you identify with??

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that pleasing everyone is impossible, but annoying everyone is a piece of cake.

I’m not saying I’m old and worn out, but I make sure I’m nowhere near the curb on trash day.

As I watch this generation try and rewrite our history, I’m sure of one thing: It will be misspelled and have no punctuation.

Me (sobbing): “I can’t see you anymore — I’m not going to let you hurt me again.”
My physical exercise instructor (exasperated): “But you did only one sit-up.”

I haven’t gotten anything done today. I’ve been in the produce department trying to open this stupid plastic bag.

Turns out that being senior is mostly just Googling how to do stuff.

I’m on two diets. I wasn’t getting enough food on one.

If you find yourself feeling useless, remember it took…

View original post 184 more words

Leave a comment

Filed under Being and Feeling, Health affairs, Lifestyle, Re-Blogs and Great Blogs, Social affairs, Welfare matters

A culture of “democratic cleansing” – Elders and youngsters versus respect

The generation born between 1930 and 1960 had no choice but to listen to father‘s law and do as we were told.

Father’s will is Law!

When we asked

Why?

We got a very short but very well to understand answer.

Therefore!

Now those generations from before the 1960s have become the “oldies”.

We live with the thought that we taught some good and interesting things to our kids, but sometimes seem to wonder what they did with what we taught them and what went wrong with the present generation.

What did we do wrong?

For sure, though we did not always agree with our parents, and dared to go on the streets in 1968 to question our way of living and our society, we always still showed respect for our parents and grandparents. In many cases, there were no great-grandparents. Our grandparents, to us, looked already

so old

at an age that we now already survived a few years.

Unlike our parents, we taught our children to dare to question everything and not just accept or consider everything.

At home and at school we learned courtesy rules. But what is left of it? Some of the things we learned, such as keeping the door open for ladies, are not always anymore appreciated but are viewed as a sexist attitude.

Humphrys writes

If I’ve taught them anything at all – pretty unlikely I know – it’s that healthy scepticism beats the pants off reverence. Always has. Always will.

And yet… maybe just the teeniest smattering of respect might not come amiss? Possibly not boys doffing their caps to ladies in the street as my school ordered us do. After all, who wears caps nowadays? (And is ‘ladies’ sexist? What if they’re trans?)

But perhaps an acknowledgement that we oldies just might have picked up some useful stuff during our decades of experience on this planet that could come in useful? That’s tricky in today’s climate. Just that word “experience” is fraught. It has to be a “lived” experience now and I’m not sure I know what that is.

We have also been brought up to check the past and present and to seek the truth each time.

Our parents taught us that if we did not know something, we should go and look it up in the encyclopaedias provided. Those writers were expected to have undergone sufficient schooling and presented well-founded articles under editorial authority to inform the reader and provide further knowledge. We found it great to find such reference works that contained information on all branches of knowledge or that treated a particular branch of knowledge in a comprehensive manner.

For more than 2,000 years encyclopaedias have existed as summaries of extant scholarship in forms comprehensible to their readers. But in the last two decades, we saw several well-known encyclopaedias disappearing from the market.

At our house, the 1968 Encyclopaedia Britannica, as the oldest English-language general encyclopaedia, was just one of the many other encyclopaedias we could use daily.

The researchers and authors and publishers of encyclopaedias had to face technological changes, beginning in the 1980s with the development and spread of personal computers. It really became a world that opened up, making it possible to look up documents from all over the world. The computer business evolved so fast, quickening in the 1990s and 2000s through the Internet and widespread diffusion of broadband access, it radically altered the publishing world generally and the encyclopaedia business in particular.

The 15th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (1974), was designed in large part to enhance the role of an encyclopaedia in education and understanding without detracting from its role as a reference book. It represented very much the way we were brought up, finding it necessary to educate and to spread knowledge. Its three parts (Propædia, or Outline of Knowledge; Micropædia, or Ready Reference and Index; and Macropædia, or Knowledge in Depth) represented an effort to design an entire set on the understanding that there is a circle of learning and that an encyclopaedia’s short informational articles on the details of matter within that circle as well as its long articles on general topics must all be planned and prepared in such a way as to reflect their relation to one another and to the whole of knowledge.
For those who wanted to learn more or wished to delve deeper into a particular fact or topic, the Propædia became a great help for self-study. The propaedia was a reader’s version of the circle of learning on which the set had been based and was organised in such a way that a reader might reassemble in meaningful ways material that the accident of alphabetisation had dispersed.

In 1981, under an agreement with Mead Data Central, the first digital version of the Encyclopædia Britannica was created for the LexisNexis service. In the early 1990s Britannica was made available for electronic delivery on a number of CD-ROM-based products, including the Britannica Electronic Index and the Britannica CD (providing text and a dictionary, along with proprietary retrieval software, on a single disc). A two-disc CD was released in 1995, featuring illustrations and photos; multimedia, including videos, animations, and audio, was added in 1997.

seems to find it a waste of money that his parents scrimped to pay a weekly shilling to the Encyclopaedia Britannica door-to-door salesman so that they as kids would always have the world’s knowledge at their fingertips.

He gives the impression that those modern machines and the evolution of artificial intelligence is one of the many reasons why respect between the generations matters.

We do admit that many young people do not understand how the elderly can or cannot handle today’s modern gadgets.

Millennials (born 1981-1996) tend to put the boomers (born post-war) into a category. Specifically, men. Usually “old white men”.

How come that usage is tolerated? Substitute “women” for men and it wouldn’t be. It would be sexist. Substitute “black” for white and it would be racist.

He observes

Those who once wore the badge of old age with a certain pride must now carefully guard their tongues less they cause offence, even when it’s patently obvious that none was intended. Was it necessary to humiliate Lady Susan Hussey when she was seemingly too curious about the origins of a black woman who was wearing a vivid tribal dress? Her offence, it turned out, was being old.

Getting old happens to all of us. How we deal with it is very different. But it is also very different from how outsiders deal with elders.
Especially in recent years, there has been an unpleasant skew there, with many viewing elders as a burden.
Similarly, few can empathise with the world of understanding of those elders who have been brought up with certain ways of thinking, some of which are also sometimes difficult to distance themselves from or continue to think stereotypically.

We all pursue dreams and shall one day be confronted with that older body, becoming aware that there is not only a tendency to forget people’s names, but having more than once looking for the right words, having forgotten (for a moment) certain things. And then in confrontation with the youngsters, they not always understand or want to give some time to get the memory back.

For some elderly it is also not evident to have to rely on others. And the children are not so pleased anymore to be a safety net for their parents, as we looked after our parents when they were already starting to reach a reasonable age. Some may be annoyued that those above 65 do not want to retire. It might be those in their 60s whose mind is fooling them in which case they will rely on others around them to let them know that it is time to retire.

How many times do those who passed the 50s have to hear from the youngsters that their ideas are old fashioned or that they are not anymore from these times? Many younger people find it not appropriate that the elderly are still pursuing ideas and aspirations. Is it a form of respect to accepting that they express their feelings as well as their dreams and aspirations?

Most young people don’t sense time as being a high-speed train, because for them it often looks ages, before there is another hour, another day. That makes them also to express their impatience so often. But then again, the fact that some elders become a bit too slow bothers those younger ones, in that it seems that that time is taken up by that elder, who then keeps them from renewing moments. Some younger ones do not mind letting the older ones know that it is time to retreat, or to get silent.

At a certain age, it can be that we feel that there has come a time we need to withdraw from the hurly-burly of the life we once knew. But it does not always feel so nice, when those younger people say it in our face. (We never would have dared to say such a thing to our elderly.)

In his book, The War On The Old, English literature professor John Sutherland wrote about what he called a culture of “democratic cleansing… a state-condoned campaign against the nation’s old”.

He describes an overwhelming sense of blame that younger generations attribute to “the wrinklies” who voted for Brexit, comfortable in the mansions they bought for a pittance. The once-dignified badge of seniority is becoming synonymous with “narrow-minded”, “outdated” and “incipiently senile”.
The elderly are bed-blockers, job-blockers, pension-drainers. {We used to respect our elders – whatever happened to that? by }

Normally, one went from one generation to the next with improvements, but today that no longer holds true. Today’s 30-year-olds have it much harder than their parents did. The age-old argument over which generation has had more advantages has been settled – at least where finances are concerned.

Adult life is harder to afford now than it was 30 years ago and it has forced today’s young to delay big life events, which tend to happen around this milestone age. Today’s generation are buying their first home two years later, having ­children three years later and getting married six to seven years later than they were in 1992. {Six reasons why boomers have it better than millennials by }

Due to the pressures of the outside world, those in their twenties and thirties may have become a bit “shorter” in their statements, and it is not always easy for them to be patient with those older people who are, as it were, still watching them or ready with criticism.

Dependence on two earners can make taking time off to care for children ­trickier, and to care for older people, even more, trickier or not so wanted. So it should not always be viewed so negatively by the elderly when those young people now show a little less time than their parents who could make more time for their parents and grandparents.

Many today are so engrossed in their work and the expectations of fellow peers that they have little time left outside their work sphere for their own spiritual formation, religious pursuits and many family activities outside their own families.

It can well be that certain actions and reactions of youngsters are sometimes unjustly interpreted as respectless, or not showing enough respect. It must not be disrespectful, but just because of these other times with much more pressure on the youngsters, that the gap between young and old has widened somewhat today compared to previous decades.

+

Preceding

A more recent discrimination: Old Age

A Cranky Old Man

Readers, likes and comments

Thought on the birthday of an encyclopaedia

Available information for the youngsters and readers of my websites

Redeeming Our World

The Way You Live Your Life

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan back with a bang

Mishmash of a legal code but importance of mitzvah or commandments

++

Additional reading

  1. Ageing and Solidarity between generations
  2. Who is considered Old
  3. Man in picture, seen from the other planets
  4. Subcutaneous power for humanity 1 1940-1960 Influenced by horrors of the century
  5. Justififiable anger or just anarchism
  6. A trillion words
  7. Looking at an era of international “youth culture”
  8. Did the picture change for Working dads
  9. Living in this world and viewing it
  10. Hippies, a president, a damaged ozone layer and knights
  11. This Week Twenty-Five Years Ago: The Velvet Revolution Succeeds, December 1989
  12. Our brothers in Kyiv’s northwest suburb Irpin
  13. Russia not wanting it neighbours countries to cooperate with the West
  14. Left behind for economical emigration
  15. 2014 Social contacts
  16. 2014 Human Rights
  17. Time to consider how to care for our common home
  18. Welfare state and Poverty in Flanders #7 Education
  19. Martin Luther King’s Dream Today
  20. This fighting world, Zionism and Israel #5
  21. Another Jewish Voice on Trump’s plan: No peace without equality and mutual respect
  22. The truest greatness lies in being kind
  23. Agape, a love to share with others from the Fruit of the Spirit
  24. Approachers of ideas around gods, philosophers and theologians
  25. Cleanliness and worrying or not about purity
  26. Today’s thought “Teachers will be judged with greater strictness than others” (December 09)
  27. Perspectives
  28. Hungarian undermining of European freedoms

+++

Related

  1. A reflective Morning
  2. Time Hobbles On
  3. Beautiful, she said
  4. I am old.
  5. Learning to be Old–5
  6. The effects of just being you… Age.
  7. When You Grow Old
  8. The Age Old Question…
  9. Ageism in the workplace
  10. Life is Short
  11. Pursuing dreams to stay young in mind
  12. What We Need, in Order to, Age Gracefully
  13. I Can’t Breath Through It All
  14. Thirty Five Years and Old.
  15. How to be Old
  16. 75 And Counting
  17. Age 90+
  18. Stillness
  19. Dealing with Age Discrimination: Workers’ rights and strategies
  20. “The best gift you can give your children, is the love and respect you demonstrate for their mother.”
  21. Respect for life…
  22. … the taste of respect
  23. life will teach you to honor and respect balance.
  24. I do respect people’s faith
  25. High recognitions . . . Honor and respect them, though you no longer worship them
  26. Paris attacks darkning the world
  27. Holidays break – Day 7

9 Comments

Filed under Being and Feeling, Cultural affairs, Educational affairs, Fashion - Trends, History, Knowledge & Wisdom, Lifestyle, Questions asked, Religious affairs, Social affairs, Welfare matters

Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

Montañas de la Sierra de Agalta, Olancho. Hond...

Montañas de la Sierra de Agalta, Olancho. Honduras. Photo by Dennis Garcia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On Tuesday in Honduras lawmakers voted unanimously to ban child marriage, making it illegal in the Central American nation for children under the age of 18 to get married under any circumstances.

“The fight against child marriage is a strategic way of promoting the rights and empowerment of women in various areas, such as health, education, work, freedom from violence,”

Portillo, Plan’s Honduras country director, said in a statement.

Enforcing the law will be hardest in indigenous communities and poor rural areas in Honduras where child marriage is most prevalent, campaigners say.

A lot has still to be done all over the world where 1 in 5 women aged 15-49 are reported to have experiencing physical and/or sexual violence even by an intimate partner within a 12 month period.

Data on the prevalence of violence against women and girls is often lacking. This is especially true for women and girls with disabilities, ethnic minorities, migrant workers and older women. Even where the data exists, comparability across and within countries remains a considerable challenge for global monitoring.

It is each responsible citizen to take action when he or she sees something abnormal. Each of us has to take the responsibility to eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM).

The sensitive nature of FGM poses challenges in the reliable collection and comparability of such data, as families are reluctant to provide these details. In addition, prevalence levels among different groups and/or regions within countries are not always available, leaving only national prevalence rates which obscure differences.

Also lots of work has to be made to have woman put on the same scale as their male counterparts at work, having the same pay. Wages for the same work has to be equal for man and woman, with the only difference that those who do it already longer, have much more experience and as such can work faster, should be allowed a premium for their ‘seniority’.

Unpaid domestic and care work should be recognised by the governments and as such be accounted for the retirement rates. those women who spend time to bring up their kids should not be penalised. It should be taken into account that those who want to do a full-time job and put their children under the care of others, either should pay the prize for such service, or when getting it cheaper should share in the cost for a pensionfund for those who take care of their kids themselves and as such can not earn more money to live more in luxury.

On the job, in politics every woman should have the same say as their male counterparts. We do have to ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life. For this we should see that it is already established in the local clubs and smaller groups in our society and is represented in the amount of active local politicians. Everywhere we should take care that every girl or woman counts and shall be heard.

+

Please read

+++

Further reading

  1. Building / Raising the girl child
  2. Equality for women, really?
  3. Chinna chinna aasai 
  4. Gender pay gap explained by children and choice of field, study finds
  5. Reflections on the links between Johns and everyone else who sexually objectifies women.
  6. Reviewing Goal 5 at HLPF!
  7. What is HLPF?

types of feminism

+++

Related articles

 

2 Comments

Filed under Activism and Peace Work, Being and Feeling, Crimes & Atrocities, Economical affairs, Headlines - News, Juridical matters, Lifestyle, Political affairs, Social affairs, Welfare matters, World affairs

Summermonths and consumerism

Summertime seems to have difficulties to show her face this year. Over a few days the days will shorten again and we did not have yet some real good nice warm days.

In the supermarkets they feel the consumption of meat not taking off like they want and therefore they are presenting special bargain prices, advertising against other trying to present the cheapest products. If they would be the best products would be an other matter. Also if they would be produced in a decent ethical way is for many of no concern.

We can imagine Middle School teacher Bob James throughout the year has to face his pupils with all sorts of gadgets, disturbed and tempted by lots of consumer products and market activities.

Real teachers do find it necessary to help others. Bob James also is firmly convinced that all of us need to be more proactive in helping others.

We need to help them when disaster strikes, when they are recovering and then when developing their lives to be the people that God intended them to be. We are meant to be independent of all except for God. On Him alone should we be dependent. Thus, as I seek to help others, I seek to move beyond mere relief and am focusing on rehabilitation and reconciliation. We are to be reconciled with God, with our fellow human beings and with our environment. If any one of these is missing, we will have problems. This is a tall order, but I will always seek to bring reconciliation. {About Me}

He, like many teachers are daily confronted with the non-interest for God, is probably also seeing that today the kids, but also their parents, have made new gods and have more interest in the material belongings than the spiritual.

The Human Use of Human Beings

The Human Use of Human Beings (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In previous articles on this blog we pointed out to this behaviour which is destroying our society like CO poisoning, not seen, not smelled, not heard. We are living in a society where eyes are directed on gaining capital, even if we need not to take notice of necessary protection for man or do not mind bringing shortage or harm to others, to get more money.

Our economy is based on consumerism. Ads are designed to appeal to people like me and make me not just want, but Need, the latest thing – whether that be a soft drink or the latest model car. {June 8 – What I Really Need}

In the years straight after the World Wars people seemed to know again the value of the necessities of life. Folks appreciated again the small things. (We remember sitting with three on a bench, having one study book, which we savoured like the best we could have to receive knowledge. We never wanted to have it for ourselves alone and where pleased when we could share things with others.) They were pleased with what they could get. They also wanted to show to others who they were and used their cloths to present their identity.

Today everybody seems to be hiding behind their clothes. They now have to be from one or the other brand, design and colour which is in fashion. All want to belong to the group and hide their own self behind brands which are ‘in’. Everything must be dictated by the market. Nobody wants to go against what the market dictates.

English: RedEye Sailboat Category:Images of Ch...

RedEye Sailboat one of the things people like to have for enjoying themselves and to show off (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Summer this is made even more clear by everybody wanting to go in the garden and show off with what the market advertises and wants to press on everybody. As such, once it is beautiful weather, we can not sit outdoors without having to smell all the combustion products, from the people who do not know how to use properly those advertised and bought barbecue sets.

Having holiday also became equivalent to travelling. When people to day are saying they go on holiday, they mostly mean and want the other person to think they are going to travel abroad. For many taking a holiday in the own garden or in the own country is not having a holiday any more. The market made them to believe to relax and to take vacation or to take leave has to be going abroad and spending a lot of money at enjoyment, entertainment parks, luxury meals and pampering and health treatments.

People have to believe they only count in this society when they can show that they are using the latest gadgets and are ‘by the time’. All people who have not the newest things are ‘old’ or ‘out of date’. They best are ignored or put aside, as not being the right people to associate with. Or they are laughed at as old fashioned or ‘nerds’.

Bob James remarks:

How easily we buy the latest thing and throw away the old. One of the problems is that we not only throw away things, we also tend to throw away people or relationships if they don’t “meet our needs.” {June 8 – What I Really Need}

Those needs have become very selfish. Everything is directed to the ‘I’ and to the ‘what can I gain from this relationship’. Most people want to associate with other people in such a way that they may be sure others will find them interesting for the knowledge and acquaintances of such people. Most relations are build on the use they can provide for the self. Not the giving away has become important, nor the meaning something for some one else, but the meaning for the person him or herself, has become the landmark.

Clearly the focus of most people came on to the wrong things. This also made many relationships not last and break down. Often we see the other person has become of no real value, when not usable any more. We see that at work. As son as a person gets to ‘old’ or to ‘experienced’ and to ‘expensive because of ‘seniority’ he is made redundant.

But also the material things do not get time to stay in use as valuable. As soon there is a new model, the old one is considered as ‘passée’ .
Most people have placed their mind on things which are disposable.

What we should be thinking about is not “things,” but people. {June 8 – What I Really Need}

writes Bob James.

What we should be focusing on more than anything is our relationship with God. {June 8 – What I Really Need} (Though in his article gives a quote about focussing on Jesus, who is not God but the son of God, but who also deserves our attention.)

Today, we can see that a lot of people who are debtors to the material things of this world. Most have forgotten that their body should be a temple, a place for clean things. Natural products for many are a laugh-stock. Biological products for many are either for the ‘loonies’ or have become a way to show off, because they are much more expensive and a way to proof they can afford it and belong to such a class of people, having enough money to buy such things.

Instead of respect for nature and respect for the Creator of all those things man shows more interest to the highly perishable idols presented on television and more and more on the internet, which brings totally new sorts of idols in the living room. All those living according to flesh, often forget that they too, like anybody else, are going to die, but if in spirit they kill the deeds of the body, and that they have much better prospects. For those who live in the spirit can find real intense worthwhile life.

Part of our problem with this issue is that our desires have been made to seem like needs. If we began each day with a focus on Jesus Christ, many of those things we think are “needs” would be shown to be desires. {June 8 – What I Really Need}

Christ Jesus is the man of flesh and blood who gave the world an example how to live according to the will of the Only One God, Whom we should consider the Most High and the Most Valuable. Jesus knew he could not do anything without God. Jesus never did his own will but always wanted to do the Will of God.  Today most consider God a flaw or useless invention.

Lots of people, having all those modern gadgets still do not feel happy. Having so many things they do not yet feel satisfied. They still have a hunger …

They are starving for the real better thing which they do not seem to see by the mist of consumerism. Lots of people are running into problems when they work so hard to take care of all their desires for material things, that they forget to spend more time to build up good relations.

Most people do not see or forget about what they really need.

Bob James thinks about a strong relationship with Jesus Christ, but seems to forget an even more important relationship, namely that with the heavenly Father of Jesus, the Only One True God.

This world needs to find the way back to God. It has lost connection with the Creator. The world has become strayed. We have to take care we become not astray by the temptations around us.

Keep your eyes on Jesus and as such find the Way to God and the way to God’s Kingdom.

+

Preceding articles:

Lonely in the crowd

Misleading world, stress, technique, superficiality, past, future and positivism

Less… is still enough

Less for more

Contentment: The five senses

How to Find the Meaning of Life and Reach a State of Peace

See the conquest and believe that we can gain the victory

The Cares of Life

The natural beauties of life

Engagement in an actual two-way conversation with your deities

Just be yourself…

A Snippet of Advice on Cultural Analysis

++

Find additional literature:

  1. Capitalism
  2. Increasing wealth gap of immense proportions in the Capitalist World
  3. Classes of people and Cronyism
  4. Uncertainty, shame and no time for vacillation
  5. Because men choose to go their own way
  6. Welfare state and Poverty in Flanders #9 Consumption
  7. A risk taking society
  8. What IF you’re only driven by stress?
  9. Ecological economics in the stomach #2 Resources
  10. How do you keep people from stealing your joy?
  11. 2014 Social contacts
  12. Justififiable anger or just anarchism
  13. Ability for a community to come back from a crisis
  14. Green Claims in Europe
  15. Greenpeace demands scale up of ecological farming
  16. Happy International Happiness Day!
  17. Being Religious and Spiritual 1 Immateriality and Spiritual experience
  18. Being Religious and Spiritual 3 Philosophers, Avicennism and the spiritual
  19. Being Religious and Spiritual 8 Spiritual, Mystic and not or well religious
  20. Looking for True Spirituality 2 Not restricted to an elite
  21. How long to wait before bringing religiousness and spirituality in practice
  22. Sharing thoughts and philosophical writings
  23. Lovers of God, seekers and lovers of truth
  24. Fools despise wisdom and instruction
  25. In a world which knows no peace sharing blessed hope
  26. The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking places
  27. Cleanliness and worrying or not about purity
  28. Cognizance at the doorstep or at the internet socket
  29. Jehovah steep rock and fortress, source of insight
  30. Perishable non theologians daring to go out to preach
  31. Bringing Good News into the world
  32. How should we preach?
  33. Thanksgiving wisdom: Why gratitude is good for your health
  34. Food as a Therapeutic Aid
  35. Remember there’s a light in the next day
  36. It is a free will choice
  37. To know Christ is filling life with meaning
  38. Heed of the Saviour
  39. Songs in the night Worship God only
  40. Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked

+++

16 Comments

Filed under Economical affairs, Food, Lifestyle, Spiritual affairs