EH: S2 E8 breaking newz SPECIAL SUPER BOWEL EDITION

 

hello ELDER HOSTILE members

Serious Shit Column*:

Must reading assignment to earn course credit this Substack post from my hero, Timothy Snyder, who knows WTF is going on, with such insight, knowledge, & expressed with precision. 

https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/the-logic-of-destruction?r=1toffv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

*If you don't read the essay above start to finish, your future access to ELDER HOSTILE will consist of us telling you that you have hit a firewall and have to cough up some dough to finish reading the post.  Kinda like that "they" at the bridge...  yeah, right! a TROLL with a toll; that's it.

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ELDER HOSTILE february photo of the month

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One day in the life of your editor 

i have recently been invited by a group consisting of ten of my high school 400 odd person class asking me to attend a reunion this July celebrating our 75th birthday year, rather than the traditionally used 0 or 5 ending anniversary.  My reaction was that i suspected we must be dropping like flies and it seemed a good way for them to maximize the head count before the next one is scheduled three years from now. 

And, if we are around three years from now, we'll be less likely able to travel up to Long Island from Boca, West Palm, or Deerfield, or god forbid....The Villages.  Twelve percent of my class still alive now live in Florida, which should not have surprised me, but did.  That many of them may look like a lot but, we're not counting the dead ones.  with them added, we're talking conservatively a 25%+ "dropout rate" as they call it in the funeral trade.  the invitation made me feel somewhat nostalgic in that it got me started to wonder what my classmates from 57 years ago ended up doing with our overwhelmingly privileged lives? And why are they compelled to flock to Florida to live out our "end of life phase" there?

We indeed, turned out to be quite a successful group!  It was heartening to see some of my classmates become doctors, scientists, honest lawyers (sic), educators, successfully run the business they inherited from their parents, etc.  There were lots and lots of lawyers, but few, oddly, ending up practicing during their career once they got their degree.  Law school was a good way then to dodge the draft and you also didn't know what you wanted to do with your life.  On the other end of the spectrum, we had at least two graduates who were given jail sentences for cheating people out of their money*.  we had one suicide (sadly a close friend of mine during high school).  

what became clearer and clearer as i looked into each of their histories, it turns out that my sense of these people in high school made a great deal of sense of what they became.  it seems that at 18, our personalities were already set, waiting to be fully baked..... of course, the details & events of their lives that made them what they became are missing.   But, one could see the leaders became leaders, the brains did smart things, arty types did arty type things, and the assholes did asshole things.  

i also learned when the assholes run things, look out**.  i wonder which category i fit into then?  it was at that moment that i had this epiphanic experience. i realized that i was an asshole then and after all these years still a member, I can honestly say, i'm an asshole today!  But, all hope has not evaporated.  I still don't live in Florida.   

---mm, Ed.

Eliminating Equity in Education Not Only Denies All Children the Chance to Learn; It Dismantles the Foundation of a Free and Just Society.

*see Bernie Madoff, Far Rockaway, LI

**see our present condition 

and, as far as i'm concerned Canada, i'd love to see you do it!

THAT IS THE CONCLUSION OF OUR SPECIAL

SUPER BOWEL 

edition with bonus editorial from your editor