Another Birthday

13 Masa'il 162 B.E. December 23 - 24, 2005 A.D.

Well another birthday is here, I am another year older and wiser (although I am not sure that wisdom and age necessarily go together). I checked on my profile today, just to make sure everything was the way I want it, and noticed that where I put my birthday and year in the note to the side informed me that the year could be left blank. I, of course, did not remove the year, because it really does not matter if people know precisely how old I am or not - age is relative. A person can appear and act either older or younger then their chronological age. A person can feel either older or younger than they really are, so age is relative.

Modern society puts too much emphasis on age. Do not get me wrong a person should do every thing he or she can to keep themselves looking and feeling as good as possible. However, the that must be done because it makes the individual feel good and not because of any pressure from society or any other individual. We forget that senior citizens have a great deal of knowledge accumulated over their life time. This knowledge not only should be preserved, but it should be sought by the younger people.

Senior citizens have lived through historic events that we only read about in history book. My mother is in her 90s, she lived through the Great Depression and World War II. I remember Viet Nam and the Free Love/Flower Child years. Both my mother and I saw the first man set foot on the Moon. We saw the Berlin Wall come down and remember events of the Cold War. The young people alive today will see World Peace. What I am trying to say is preserve the memories, the events happening in the world today will not happen again. These are historic time and the children of the future will want to know about them. So we need to keep the first hand accounts of them - someone said To forget history is to repeat it, so let us not forget it, to forget the mistakes of history is to repeat those mistakes.