Agreed. The "old people shouldn't vote" comments left a bad taste in my mouth last night. I had a composition in my head in case I came back here today and those ideas hadn't been called out. To be blunt, it's extremely illiberal to be considering such a thing; it's on the same spectrum as "black people shouldn't vote."
The truth is, everyone is responsible for change, and it will take all of us, no matter our age, to get to the desired future (it's not up to just woke millennials or Gen Z or whatever). As Native Americans understand, everyone living is also an ancestor; all people have a stake in the 7th generation to come.
(BTW, I think prisoners, not just ex-convicts, should be allowed to vote too).
@jeanne-mayell. I thought the post was meant to be sarcasm. I can’t imagine that anyone on this website would seriously think that elderly people should not vote.
When I was trying to figure it all out, I did a google search to see if anyone out there was writing about it and found something from Time Magazine that wrote about it in jest.
Why Old People Should not be Allowed to Vote: Aug.2016
Excerpt: ...When I ran this idea by my 76-year-old father, he partly agreed. “If a 90-year-old has what you can define as dementia, you can test for it,” he said. I explained that I was thinking more of 76. I also explained that the problem wasn’t that seniors forget things as much as they remember the world of 60 years ago and want to reproduce it. But one challenge of arguing with older people is that because of all the cable-news watching and Founding Father — book reading, they know more. My dad mentioned stare decisis, using Edmund Burke’s argument that society is so complex that radical change often has horrible unintended negative consequences such as Napoleon, communism and that horrible rap music...
Well, in order to solve the crisis, we must truly understand what is happening . Let's start with Alaska. The reality of what happened after the Exxon Valdez catastrophe and lasting effects 30 years later.
It is Earth Day!
While I don't know how we will help heal our earth, I do believe we will be moving more quickly and in earnest to care for her.
May we learn to live in respect and harmony with our beautiful home once again.
Please send you prayers and healing energy to our beautiful blue planet and all who inhabit her lands, dwell in her waters and fly through her air.
I am very happy about the proposals that have been pledged for cutting emissions and moving to cleaner energy. What a huge contrast Biden has set from Trump. Wow, I'm so happy.
Obviously more can and should be done, but having the US at the table again makes a huge difference.
Below is a part of article from The WP Magazine.
I will re-read again and again. I've been been pondering the messages a lot.
The Search For Environmental Hope- Climate news is relentlessly, objectively grim. Should we ever allow ourselves to feel optimism?
The week Texas froze -over, in mid-February, poet Naomi Shihab Nye couldn’t save one of the marvelous gray mourning doves that flock in her yard near the San Antonio River — but she was determined to save the others. The doomed one crashed into her office window and died on the frozen ground below. All week she watched the others exhibiting behaviors she had never seen. They crowded onto a patio table until there was no room left, huddling body-to-body for warmth, and they stayed until almost dark, devouring the seed she gave them.
“These birds do not know what is happening here,” Nye told me over the phone. “This is not what they’re used to facing. … [Officials] keep talking about the ‘grid,’ the infrastructure of the state. But also what we’re talking about is the natural infrastructure of our world, and how are we going to help maintain it?”
I’d called Nye in a quest to learn how to be hopeful in the face of despair over the fate of Earth. Among many subjects in her numerous books, she writes about nature and the environment, and I wondered how a poet, someone who thinks deeply about the planet, handles the steady stream of apocalyptic news. Now caught in a weather-induced civic collapse — arguably connected to climate change (because Arctic warming has disrupted the jet stream, allowing freakishly cold storms to push south) — could she still find hope? And if so, where?
She starts with saving the doves. As humans, she says, we have to ask ourselves, “ ‘What is within my reach? What could I help change myself?’ Because just to stew in a corner and worry about all this catastrophe overtaking us will not really help us in the big picture.”
@lovendures. Powerful article. So glad to have a chance to read it.
Meanwhile in Wyoming...they want to actually STAND UP FOR COAL and sue states who refuse to buy it.
(Thank you Wyoming for distracting the nation a bit from the never ending AZ Bamboo Voter-gate.)
I ask you, IS there a sane state left currently in our country??
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/07/wyoming-coal-threat-mining-republican-governor