Thoughts on youth and age.

[leticia]

I felt old, when I noticed today in a story from Tuesday's paper, that Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Georgian luger who died at the Olympics, was born in 1988. I was born in 1981, and I'm often taken aback by the things that people born in much later years than I are doing.

So I did the math. My age, minus seven, twenty-one. I guess twenty-one isn't that young, but it isn't that old. Could I discuss the excessive fanaticism about sports and their demands on the young? I live in a town that has 5 year olds playing tackle football, and this year, a school district being sued by a paralyzed former football player.

But then, I said, perhaps we should instead discuss how many eighteen to twenty-one year olds we've killed in search of oil in the middle east. Far, far, too many, by orders of ten.

If I was a gifted essayist, I could then bind this all together with the way our corporations and corporate culture, root and seed behind both war and Olympics, devour the bodies and souls of our young; humans the master predator no more. But it is not nanotech nor artificial intelligence that will conquer us; rather a more insidious breed, of our own devising.

But I have no skill with the insightful essay, and I will leave it lie.