re: #23 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

This is what happens to the emeriti, those who retire and still want to engage, but find themselves out of step.

It’s not ageist to point out that we all grow up in a certain milieu and we are formed by that, and that it sticks with us even when we’re old.

Biden is not really transitioning to the post-internet age, where young people form connections and opinions literally quite across the world, and they are aware of what is going on, even if they don’t have the years and wisdom to necessarily pick the best path forward. But the young are who we need to redesign American politics, to finally leave the Confederate mindset that has been nurtured for 150 years.

I’m 70 years old and I think I can still engage. I am kind of selective about when and where, and I have always been aware of change as it happened. I think part of this is the influence that science fiction and real science had on me when I was growing up. It was a futuristic milieu and that future is here. It isn’t what we expected, of course, but many developments were in fact anticipated and explored. Personally accessible information networks of almost unlimited scope were a feature of many SF stories when I was young, for example. Resource depletion, over-population, the rise of destructive cults, and climate change were all addressed in myriad ways. Even the election of a buffoon like Trump was anticipated and the power of modern media was seen as a factor. Some of the strangest developments of recent years have an oddly familiar look to them.