I read a meme the other day that claimed we could no more give up AI than an addict could give up meth. Ptht!

The world is changing. Already a generation is growing up in a country where the President ridiculing his political enemies is normal. We see daily name-calling in the news and the way so many of us were bullied on the playground is normalized among adults. Behavior that would have led my mother to express her disappointment and send me to my room is now acceptable. Among adults. Overt racism and all the other ugly -isms are allowed, even encouraged by some. Speaking out for poor and disadvantaged people is suspect. Apparently, the strategy of keeping our heads down in order to avoid the bully in the schoolyard has followed some of us into adulthood. I won’t name the boy who made grade school a misery for me, but we seem to have elected his doppelgänger president.

I made the relatively innocent comment that I’d never felt comfortable with payments made under the table. A reader chewed me out. Had I always reported my babysitting money? I babysat once, as I recall. I was rubbish at it. These comments were in response to a campaign promoting the use of cash—after all, if paying babysitters was done entirely with a digital system, the teen saving money for college would have been adding to her Social Security account from the age of 14. My grandmother would have had to add $5 to my account instead of slipping a bill into my birthday card. People working a second job under the table because their retirement income didn’t quite make ends meet would be paying taxes. Imagine the horror.

Or we could ensure an actual living wage, socialize medicine, make college free, and fund the IRS so wealthy people cheating on their taxes would be caught and the rest of us would be better off.

Anyway, yes, I’d miss all the advantages of cash payments listed in that Facebook post. The argument is a distraction, though. Like so much of what we are being taught by powerful people to distrust and hate, the point isn’t to make our lives better; the point is to make their lives richer.

It’s bigotry and anger that we need to disappear.

I already miss things that disappeared from my childhood. I miss thank-you notes—seriously. I hated writing them as a little girl, but I have two friends who still send thank you notes and each one about brings me to tears. I miss landlines. I don’t wear my cell phone, but I know plenty of people who freak out if they are separated from their phones for any length of time. I miss phone booths. I miss wandering off to places where no one knows where I am and they aren’t even worried about it. I miss calling the doctor’s office and speaking to the person at the from desk in order to make an appointment. The person at the dentist’s office calls me back… so far. I miss paper magazines since I gave them up for Pinterest and each costs what I hesitate to pay for a printed book. I miss holiday dinners and cards and the rare long distance call to the friend I couldn’t afford to talk to for more than three minutes. I miss closeness between grandchildren and grandparents since two of mine avoid me.I assume that’s my fault and not simply a generational divide and that make it worse.

I am tired of Zoom and my “trash” folder filled with vulgar emails clearly intended for a sick-minded person of the opposite sex. I am tired of hearing about people’s sex lives. My podiatrist’s input forms asked me about my gender identity and I wrote: why? Why does my foot doctor care? Pronouns are useful once in a while when I talk about someone who isn’t there, but what business is it of mine how you self-identify or what you do and to whom? Honestly. [If I wanted a personal relationship with my podiatrist, I would rather he know the title of my favorite novel or my favorite color, but he told me several times during my fifteen minute appointment that he “doesn’t care” what I do.] For my evening entertainment, I don’t want to watch a rape scene and I don”t need a candid sex scene. I know how it works. Like most American adult women, I’ve been harassed and at 74, and I want those abusers punished but I really do not want to know the details others’ ordinary experiences.

I don’t want to watch films entirely consumed by violence or battles or violent attacks on people. A cozy mystery that ends with the criminal identified works fine for me. A Japanese series, Midnight Diner, is back with a new season on Netflix. Quiet and tender. Just what the doctor failed to order.