Sometimes Old People Just Suck
This letter appears in this weeks edition (8-9-2011) of our local weekly newspaper. I wrote it in response to a letter by Loreen Eliason, who used her letter to complain about homeless people in Garberville.
Dear Editor,
I thought wisdom came with age. Isn’t that why we call old people “elders” and respect them, even though they don’t do much but suck up social-security and medicare dollars.
They’re supposed to be smart, right? At least smart enough to retire before the economy collapsed, smart enough to buy homes before the housing bubble and smart enough to take jobs back when they paid enough to afford one. They were smart enough to arrive before ravenous locusts destroyed the environment and wrecked the economy.
Actually, they bear some resemblance to those ravenous locusts of the Populux age. I refer of course to the people who lived at the pinnacle of American post-war hyper-consumption. Yeah, today’s old people look just like those ravenous locusts, only older, fatter and crankier. The people who drove 25 ft long cars, dripping with chrome,
put redwood decks on their above ground pools,
and filled our landfills with every imaginable consumer product, also gave us global warming, nuclear waste, smog, and the most insanely unsustainable lifestyle in the history of humanity.
They also profited from the housing bubble, sold out the unions and take advantage of cheap labor by shopping at Wal-Mart and hiring day laborers. They skimmed the cream and then sucked up the foam too.
They should write a book titled “How to screw your planet and your progeny for the next ten generations” That’s some serious wisdom there. No one in the history of humanity has ever been so qualified to write that book, and no one in the future will ever have the opportunity again, thanks to them. If we ever find a new planet to pillage, we’ll need that book. Until then, maybe we don’t need to hear so much from them.
At least that’s how I felt after reading the words of Loreen Eliason in The Independent last week. This woman has the nerve to complain about how young people are ruining this town for her granddaughter, that young people don’t deserve a place to use the restroom and should be driven out of town. She calls them “homeless by choice.” Thanks to the aforementioned locusts, young people today don’t have the same choices they once did.
No longer do we have blue-collar jobs that pay decent wages. No longer do home prices reflect local wages. No longer can we say “fill er up” at the gas station for under $10. No longer can poor hippies afford to buy land here. We live in a different world.
While she admits “sure I did drugs back in the day, and I still love my cocktails” she condemns young people for doing the same. Was there a particular day when drug use was OK? Does that make it OK to condemn anyone who uses drugs on a different day? Her generation went shirtless, back when they were skinny, every bit as much as young kids today, and crotchety old drunk ladies complained then too. Some things never change
These kids got a raw deal, and it gets rawer every day. Until you old people are ready to sell your homes for something like what you paid for them, you can expect to see lots of homeless people around, and I wouldn’t count on them dressing for you. They don’t owe you anything, and if I were you, I wouldn’t give them any more good reasons to resent you.
