Intergenerational Conflict
I am crazy about my parents and am very blessed at my age to have them in my life. They have some physical problems but are overall in good health for 86 and 84. What is more painful to all of us is our difference in politics.
I used to tell people my dad feels like a failure at child rearing because he didn’t raise four Republicans. Last year we were lambasted because we didn’t support our president. All Americans have a responsibility to support their president, no matter what. That was Bush and this is now.
That pronouncement no longer holds true because our current president is a Democrat and they are clearly ruining our country. Being retired, my dad has a lot of time to barrage us with forwarded emails about everything from asparagus curing cancer to how we are spiraling down into bankruptcy from which we will never recover, and our grandchildren will not have a life at all.
Never has this divisiveness between parents and adult (educated) children been as bad as it is now with health care reform on the table. We get four or more emails a day predicting the end to Medicare and Social Security; health care rationing, and just letting old people die because they are not worth the investment. Despite providing him with information from many sources, including non-political sources, he is angry, defensive, and sure we are wrong.
If there is one thing I would do, it would be to put a V-chip in their TV to block Fox News. Okay, maybe any news, like the fights breaking out in town hall meetings, many caused by other people who have read the same emails he is sending us.
I was really hoping to spend some quality personal time with my parents in these older years. Instead visits turn into something akin to them trying to reverse cult programming on me. All I can do is love them, care about them, provide information when they want it (never), and hold my breath. Finding common ground, or something to talk about, is getting more and more difficult. That is affecting my health.
There are people in discrete little corners of our country who feel disenfranchised from government and society as a whole. And yet, they have a drive to find meaning in their lives. One such person is Jim Bishop, resident of Rye, CO. A mason and ironworker by profession, he commutes 60 miles each way to his job in Pueblo, and in his spare time for the last 50 years of his life has been building a castle.
