Hear the talk:
I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. A line from a T.S. Eliot poem. One sign that you are growing old is that you don’t care how you look. You are retired, don’t need to look good for others. If the pants are too long, you roll up the bottoms. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Another sign of old age? I have lots & lots of opinions. What made me think of that is imagining myself on a TV talk show. The talk show host would ask me questions and, as we Jews say, Boy do I have answers.
On the war in Iraq. Leave. Right now. We don’t belong there. Let them work out their own fate -- and we should apologize for getting involved over there in the first place. We meant well, but it backfired
Global Warming? The most urgent problem facing all of mankind. We must cooperate with other nations. There is no time to lose. It may already be too late.
Marriage? A very strange institution. Anybody who wants to -- men & women, women & women, men & men -- should be allowed to marry. Marriage is necessary not because it is sacred, but because, as someone said, it is a contract recognized by the police. Or, put simply, marriage is an economic contract -- the couple knows it exists & the authorities know it exists. Anybody who wants to, should be allowed to.
Drugs. Legalize them & tax them. Prostrituition, Legalize, supervise, tax. Gambling is already legal & taxed.
Boy do I have opinions. Are mine the right opinions, will they solve problems?
Like every solution ever implemented, solutions merely breed new problems. What we hope is that these are smaller problems than the ones we set out to solve, but every solution breeds new problems that need to be addressed.
So, we should legalize drugs -- but that will cause problems, and we should pull out of Iraq, but we will leave behind us tons of problems.
I grow old and I am full of opinions about everything, but opinions are merely statements that say -- I have a better solution to the situation -- but the solution is full of problems.
Inequality? I believe in progressive taxation. You make a little you pay a little in taxes, you make a lot, you pay a lot of taxes -- all the way up to 90% of your income -- and in my lifetime, in the U.S., that was, for a period of time true.
When I was a teenager I had absolutely no firm opinions. I hadn’t been married. I hadn’t paid taxes. I didn’t really know what I thought about drugs or cars or health care.
But now I have strong opinions on many subjects. And here are a final few. I am 100 per cent for socialized medicine, and I believe in strong, unbelievably strong, anti-gun laws. I also believe our Immigration policy needs to be changed….
I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. I grow old, I grow old, my mind is full of strong opinions on every subject. So long
Copyright © 2007 Henry Morgenstein