Power

Lately, my days don’t begin as I would wish them to. Time Goes By, the Ronni Bennett blog that I’ve been enjoying for the past months or so, has shut its doors. That blog was usually my first stop of the morning. Now, where can I go?

I did find this final interview with Ronni on the Boomer 411 site. And this is from that interview…

“…Because American culture so adores youth to the exclusion of age, I think there is an idea, hardly articulated among us, that to retire is to enter another, less colorful country where we become different from what we were - less interesting and interested. That is wrong.

However, surveys show that retired women are much more likely than men to not only continue past interests, but to take up new ones. Men, according to surveys, appear to miss the status of their work life more than women do and that is something boomer men should consider and find a way to deal with before retirement.”

As usual, I’m different. I don’t miss my work life at all. Sure, I enjoy posting to my Working blog, but that’s history and memories of a far distant time. In fact, it was history long before I retired.

I’m living an entirely new life now and I find it quite interesting. I don’t have time to do all the things I want to do, but I do have the freedom to choose each day what I will do and I’m learning something new every day. My body still works, though it shows signs of wear. I could probably deal with a physical failure, but the thought of mental failure fills me with dread. That wouldn’t be living at all. I want to keep on ‘thinking’ at all costs.

And by the way, this stage of life is just like all the others; there are no instructions.

I’ve moved on in the book, Commander in Chief, by Geoffrey Perret and I’m almost finished with the Truman era. What a great read! I was 12 when Truman left the scene and Ike became president. And the names that I read are familiar to me but without any depth of knowledge. (At that age I read the newspaper every day, but television didn’t ‘do’ the news as we know it today. We were a radio family and the radio was always sitting on the kitchen table.) Clark Clifford, General Marshall, General MacArthur and Dean Atcheson are given in-depth treatment in the book. The only one who comes out looking good after this is General Marshall. He, at least, had the good sense to submit his resignation to Truman rather than going along with him.

What I’ve read so far also scares me. Truman pushed the ‘nuclear’ button without a lot of knowledge as to what was going to happen afterwards. He simply wasn’t that bright. Or caring. And since those days of atomic bombs, we’ve moved on to hydrogen bombs and increased the potential for the destruction of the human race to a level that should terrify us… if we only knew. And that’s the problem today; with only a few generations left alive that do remember the horror of the atomic bomb, the words have become ink on paper and have no power any more. It’s like reality television and no one gets hurt.

To think that bush has that power should scare us all…