Getting Old

This one I wrote last year on my birthday. Since I still think the same I’ll publish it now:

Today I am turning 67 years old. It is a very important number, because this is the age at which most of the living people in the US become eligible to get their Social Security benefits and retire. I personally belong to a different group; I was born in 1953 that means I was eligible to apply for my Social Security benefits at the age of 66 so I got mine last year.
I can’t describe how great it feels to watch YouTube all night long and then sleep all day; or go away in the middle of a school year, when the tickets are cheapest; or just spend a month there and another month here. This is what I would call The Freedom.
I have to add to the above, that it was harder and harder to get up in the morning to go to work. It was harder and harder to drive for an hour there and another hour back. It was harder physically, but it also was harder emotionally. You are there among all these young people, know it all, experienced it all, but can’t share; they need to go through their own tries and errors, they need to grow their own experiences, and they don’t believe that you have really known it all and been there already. The only thing you can do is step away and let them learn it their own way.
So I will grow my garden and observe life around me.
Here is the first and most annoying fact of this life that I observed so far.
In June 1944, 3 months before our famous D-day, Herbert Hoover said: “Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.” 16 years ago Chris Rock repeated this while talking about the war we started in Iraq in 2003. I am this old person who must feel the responsibility for the lives of these young people who are fighting the wars for me now. I must behave responsibly and I must respect the young people’s decisions and their lives. I do not understand why the decisions are still made by old farts, who sit, NO, they are rolled into the Congress in wheel chairs; why they still make the decisions about the lives of our youth!!!! Come on! RETIRE, like I did. Let the young rule, make their own mistakes and get their own experiences.