I will start by saying that I was not raised Catholic. I was raised Protestant by a not-particularly-religious family. I know that a great many people believe in a Higher Power who many of them call God, and to many of them, the Pope is the earthly delegate to God.

I am agnostic bordering on atheistic. I have been exposed, through various 12-step programs, to all kinds of ideas of a Higher Power. I find most of them to be a comforting fantasy. The closest I can come is believing in God as in natural beauty, unmolested by the most intelligent and destructive animal which is mankind. I believe that in life, in a large part, you reap what you sow. Another way of putting it is that what goes around, comes around. Usually, but not always. Sometimes the bad guy gets away, like the murderous former Ugandan President-for-Life Idi Amin. He died of old age in exile in South America, presumably living comfortably from his plunder.

I am, at my best, a live-and-let-live type of person. Whatever gets you through the night, and all that. I just don’t see how American Catholics can look down their noses at Muslims, when they ascribe all kinds of supernatural powers to a kindly old man wearing bedsheets and a cross.

Okay. In any kind of argument, I’ll admit that I have stoked the fires of divisiveness. But this is a blog, so I don’t have to be perfect. I really believe that Fox News, founded by Roger Ailes in the mid-nineties, has done more than anything or anybody else to divide America.

I remember when “All in the Family” was popular, back in the early and middle 1970s. Norman Lear, the man who started the show, said that the thing that stuck with him most was, in a commercial break, the water pressure in NYC would go down, due to people using the restroom. In those days there were 3 networks. No internet. Everybody got their news from pretty much the same places. The younger generation’s music was pretty much monolithic. We all liked the Who, Jethro Tull, the Rolling Stones. I’m talking about white youth, of course. I would guess the Temptations, Sly and the Family Stone, Barry White, Rare Earth, for blacks, perhaps. I’m not sure about other cultures. The point I’m making is that we Americans were reading from more or less the same playbook in entertainment and politics. Now, with the internet and numerous cable stations, there is so much fragmentation. There are so many different genres of my old standby, rock & roll, that I wouldn’t know where to begin. It used to be hard rock, metal, soft rock, maybe a couple others.

With entertainment, it is a little disappointing to me that things have become so fragmented. But disappointment is not dangerous. What is dangerous is what’s happening to our politics. Fox dominates political news. MSNBC doesn’t even come close, and in fact, is in the process of getting rid of most of their liberal commentators. So you have Fox being many people’s only source of news. In spite of their “fair and balanced” slogan, they are anything but. So now we have a right wing that doesn’t even believe in facts unless they suit their purposes. And the left, including myself, gets angry and takes the opposite side.

So what we have is that there is the left wing narrative and the right wing narrative. The way a person views current events depends on the filter they are looking through. Facts come secondary to the narrative. So people aren’t communicating, they are shouting from the other side of the canyon. Nobody is listening, everybody is shouting.

I don’t know what the answer is. Regardless of who becomes President in 2016, the other side won’t let them accomplish anything. The big kahuna, though, is the Supreme Court. For that reason, if not for anything else, I am pushing for a Democrat to win the election. Even if he or she can’t get legislation passed, they can make judicial appointments. That makes all the difference, and that makes apathy not an option for us.

Mostly becoming popular in the ’60s, we have, as a society, confronted many dash isms. I use dash because I don’t believe that punctuation comes through correctly in WordPress. The oldest and most widely used dash ism seems to be racism. Feminism had an enormous period of popularity in the late sixties and seventies, but sadly, it has fallen into disuse as we seem to be in a combination of denial and post feminist culture. That is a subject for another blog. The dash ism that I want to confront today is Ageism.

Ageism has never been much of a popular ism. There are reasons for that. One is that older people have usually mellowed to an extent, and are more at peace with the world and themselves than younger hotheads. Another is that senior citizens are a self-limiting demographic. They have a tendency to pass away. Older people are frequently wiser also, knowing that some things are not worth worrying about. I don’t think I’m that wise yet.

I am currently sidelined with an ankle injury. In ten days, my walking boot will come off and I will be able to resume normal activities. Coincidentally, the day I injured my ankle was the day before I retired from my state job. I took an early retirement package. I like to say I didn’t leave my job, my job left me. It was becoming an impossible situation, and I took a way out. With all this time on my hands, I have reflected on the subject of ageism. I am at an age now that throughout most of my life I would have considered old. It’s funny how the definition of old age changes as one ages. Old age is ten years older than me.

I just think that in our society, much too much emphasis is placed on youth. We are all on the same road, just at different points on that road. My mother is in her nineties, and she would put a lot of seventy year olds to shame. My father had a full head of hair until he died at 93. There are so many variables involved that I believe that, in many respects, your age represents the number of years you have been on earth, nothing more. There are so many inaccurate stereotypes. And there are so many classless people using a person’s age as an ad hominem attack on them. I have been your age and you will be my age someday. Or I will be yours. Nobody is any better than anybody else. There is luck involved in aging well, having good genes. There is also taking care of oneself. If you live like there’s no tomorrow, there’s a fair chance that, for you, there will be no tomorrow. Exercise and diet, not to mention regular checkups, rule.

It’s funny how I look back and think how young I was in years past, and at the time I couldn’t see it. What I try to do these days is to look at it the other way. I will never be younger than I am today.

I opened my morning T&G paper today, and I saw something that I never thought that I would see. A column by the New York Times’ Charles Blow. I don’t agree with Mr. Blow on everything. I believe that some of the controversial police shootings were brought on by the actions of the victims. He does not hold that view. Nevertheless, how awesome is it that we have a liberal black columnist who holds some controversial views right on the same spot in the editorial page where I have encountered numerous Michael Reagan and Tom Purcell right-wing extremist columns. I never thought I would see the day.

I know that the newspaper has undergone some changes recently, and not all of them are good. However, they reflect John Henry’s choices, and, more than that, they reflect the reality of the newspaper business in 2015. Evidently, many millennials would rather squint into their I-pods to read the news than pick up a fine paper newspaper that is a most wonderful thing in the world to me. Times change, and the changes aren’t always to my liking.

But sometimes, they are.