We are certainly entering a year of great division and uncertainty. A lot of Americans are asking themselves, who are we, what do we stand for, and has anyone seen my glasses? Blindness is expected to be big in 2019.
The answer to these questions is not like taking a stand on gun control, where a simple yea or you’re darn tootin’ will suffice. Politically, it goes much deeper. The country is divided. This is more like the first day of kindergarten (the recent swearing-in of the new Congress) and deciding where the substitute teacher is hiding, judging by the number of spitballs.
It’s a little easier to understand the problem if we use age as a definition. Let’s take myself as an example. Oh, stop cringing and learn something – or not. Anyway, I would be defined at my age as a geezer, or the kind of person who walks around saying, “What did you say?” or “Could you repeat that?” or just plain, “Huh?”
You see as you age, very often your hearing declines to the point that you have to shovel the free solicitations for hearing aids out of the mailbox. It’s one of the first signs of geezerhood. Plus there is enough wax buildup in your inner ear canals to start your own candle business. You can also tell a person’s age by the seismic activity coming from them turning the volume of the television up so high, every alarm, air raid siren and Comcast alert goes off at once. Sometimes heat will exude from a house where people of my generation exist under puffy coats and comforters all day long. We are always freezing, a trait no doubt left over from the ice age or the Nixon era.
But along with age come political opinions and controversy. So, what do we really stand for? Well, as far as I can tell our values are cash, a savings account, Christmas Club books and the pursuit of glasses.
The real unrest, agewise, mostly comes with a group called the millennials. The classic definition is a species born between 1980 and 1990. This definition may change, depending on the source, to millennials being considered as someone coming of age within the 21st century, without fins, it goes without saying. Good luck with that.
Now, millennials are considered very bright. They are born wearing glasses, can recite the Gettysburg Address at one week old, walk a mile at a month old and as they mature, definitely have never heard of the New England Patriots. They take classes in college titled The Existential Poetry of Greenhouse Emissions. And they eat no food that has parents.
Their dress is very trendy, as in anything that was lying on the floor. Their only time commitment is an automatic alarm that signals a protest or march anywhere on the planet. They are confident and feel superior just from the fact that you have a different opinion.
So how do we get these two sides together so peace and civility will reign again? This is easier than you think. You get them in a room together where the millennials will point out that the geezer’s glasses are on their head, as they always are, and the geezers will give the millennials something that will change their lives forever – an Etch-A-Sketch.
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Nancy Katz has a degree in creative writing and is the author of the book, "Notes from the Beach." She has written the column Around Town for the Cape Gazette for twenty years. Her style is satirical and deals with all aspects of living in a resort area on Delmarva.
