You Old Baby

I had one of those epiphanies like St. Paul or that eureka guy except I wasn’t sitting in the tub.

We had a town election here last week. At 6 in the evening the polling place wasn’t very busy but the combined age of all the voters had to be 80. And it hit me as I listened to them all complaining about their taxes outside the door.

Just as we restrict the young before age 18 from voting, we should restrict old people for the last 18 years of their lives. I assume we restrict the young because they do not have the maturity to be counted on to make reasonable choices. They are not adults yet, at least legally.

The very old have passed the age of maturity and re-entered childhood. They say the same thing over and over again like babies. They have no idea where they are or why they went there. They poop in their pants given half a chance. Someone delivers their lunch, drives them to the doctors and helps them bathe.

Now, we don’t know exactly what encompasses each old fart’s last 18 years of life but, like an insurance company, we can use actuarial tables to estimate that. Let’s say no voting after age 70. Then, hopefully, we can stop listening to the whining about fixed incomes or that their children are no longer in school and when they themselves went to school THEY didn’t have computers (forgetting, of course, that no one did), and they never made $35,000 in one year so why should school teachers.

The fact is seniors have never been better off. They have incomes, health care and independent lives. What they are really bitching about is that their taxes, the lowest they have been as a percentage of income since 1958, are cutting into what they need for their weekends at Foxwoods Casino.

I say enough already. You shouldn't be driving or voting!