May 2

 Welcome to May. It has been wet and cool for the last couple of days so no gardening. Our primary election is tomorrow but we hear more about the more dramatic elections in other states than anything here. I have seen only one candidate from whom we receive a mailing every couple of days. It is always the same with the same generalities about what she will do for us but her first point ensured my vote will go elsewhere. She strongly supports "families and the unborn." And yes, she is a Republican. We live in a largely Democratic county in a largely Republican state which is generally unsatisfying. However, I will say our city Republican mayor has continued his predecessor's work on the infrastructure improvement the city has needed.

Tom Englehardt has an interesting post this morning. It appears to be a reissue of one from 2015 but I think I missed it. As I understand his regret that he didn't ask questions about his mother's life before he was born. My mother is still alive and her recollections are a joy to listen to. Someone once said that modern society, unlike previous societies, are rootless and cut off from their history. That person thought the root of that disconnectedness was because so much was changing so fast the experience of the older generation lost value. We often talk about how things have changed. Mom remembers not having a telephone (the landlady allowed residents to use hers in an emergency), radio but no TV, no computers, no internet. I remember having a phone in the house and my dad complaining about me monopolizing it, our first TV, looking up books in the library card catalog, using a dumb terminal to play a game on the university mainframe located miles away, the first desk top computer my advisor got for his lab, getting my first cell phone, my own first desk top computer (and later first lap top), and the internet from efforts of two universities I attended to connect to the present when we (Mom and I) are on from early morning to evening. Younger relatives take those changes for granted and use the technology very differently. There is little I can offer on that. But in the process the value of non-technical knowledge has lost value.

David Kaiser's post this morning doesn't have anything I haven't seen before. I have one question: what does the conclusion that no western nation has managed a "successful" fourth turning mean? What would a "successful" transformation look like? By whose standards? It reminds me of all the articles (most of which I haven't or wished I hadn't read) telling us how to "age successfully." At 73 I am decades older than most of those authors who were writing for readers only a decade or two older than they. It means zip for me--like advice for saving/investing for retirement after you are already retired and what you have is what you got. I have read Strauss and Howe's Fourth Turning and it resembles a very vague road map to an unspecified destination.