We are 72 and 71, retired for six years and officially old enough to die without anyone remarking “what a shame he/she died so young.” We worked hard and built a really good life and generally can’t complain—although we sometimes do. We realize that in the amount of time we have left, our world will most likely limp along in some fashion at least vaguely resembling its current state. We also know our children (now in their late 40s and early 50s) will probable see the world continue on for the better part of their lives but with incremental changes. What motivates us to enter the blogosphere at our “advanced age,” however, is the complete ruination facing our six phenomenal grandkids. It is our belief that their world will be unlike ours—and it will not be an improvement. These six kids are quality humans, smart, funny, kind, full of life, hardworking and talented in the arts and athletics. They are exactly the type of people we need populating our world. They do not deserve the dystopian mess they will inherit.
To put it simply, our societal institutions are breaking down—all of them. This is not simply a grumpy old curmudgeon perspective, although for the longest time we thought that might be the case. Moreover, we acknowledge that during the 1960’s our parents and most of their contemporaries thought the crazy hippy kids (us) were turning the world on its ear—and in some ways we were (the civil rights movement for one). To paraphrase one of our generation’s greatest poets, Bob Dylan (a Noble Prize for Poetry—who would have guessed that in the 1960s!), times they were a-changin’, but it was for the better, it was to build up not tear down.
Moreover, we fully acknowledge generational upheaval is nothing new. History is full of examples of intergenerational distrust and disgust from as far back as the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes (446-386 BC) who said “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.).
And, we understand that “old” people can be resistant to change. But the changes we are seeing now feel different—more fundamental, more (to use a hot button word of our present time) existential. If you doubt our premise, that our institutions are breaking down, we invite you to take a close look at the current state of the following: the disintegration of the rule of law; the politicization of our justice system; our utterly polarized and entirely broken and useless political system; our echo chamber media serving only to spout its chosen political side; the collapse of our public education system and the emergence of a single minded system that supports, if not breeds and enforces, the new “cancel culture” of group think; our reckless march toward artificial intelligence and technology; the destruction of our environment; corporate greed and wage inequity; our unconstrained rise in the cost of medicine and medical treatment; and the disintegration of our social norms, families, religions and moral codes. Admittedly, some of these institutions have been in decline for decades, perhaps centuries, and none were ever flawless. Nevertheless, these institutions provided us a sense of security and stability in the past. Now, we are like rudderless ships in the tempest of our times.
We invite you to consider carefully these failed and failing institutions as they are discussed within this website. Our intention is to do more than complain. We will offer what we believe to be suggestions for correcting these flawed systems with a hope to return some semblance of stability to our society. We invite you to consider your own corrections for these problems.
Yours truly,
The Curmudgeons
P.S. We will not be using our own names because we hope, when we can finally come out of hiding from the virus currently tyrannizing us, to be able to again enjoy going out to dinner, movies, plays, church, the ballet or symphony. We do not want to find ourselves or our children and grandchildren being harassed or our home or car vandalized by self-appointed arbiters of political correctness and threatened by the strongarm branch of the cancel culture. Our safety concern alone speaks volumes about the breakdown of a mainstay of our country—freedom of speech. I urge all these self-appointed thugs to read a little history, specifically look up the term “Brown Shirts” in Germany and the “Black Shirts” in Italy. And then ask yourselves who are the true fascists today?
The Curmudgeons Speak Out 