Dinosaurs

In response to my comment that the only way I can cope with the MRA/PUA crowd is to remind myself that they are merely dinosaurs bellowing piteously as they lurch into oblivion, a clever blogger who also comments on Manboobz posted a link to the "Extinction" scene in Disney's "Fantasia." 

As I watched it, I realized that I'd seen this before, and that the visual image I was describing had been formed and implanted in my brain while watching "Fantasia" as a child  fifty years ago.  

I find myself muttering "Dinosaurs!" a lot these days, and usually in reference to people more or less my own age -- which is not so very old, mind you -- who can't or won't grasp that the greater social environment has changed, and however much they moan and roar, it's not ever going back to accommodate them.  I cannot remember the exact quote, but something like "shuffling backwards into the future" comes to mind.

And I ought to know.  Every day, I'm painfully aware of my increasing obsolescence.  It hasn't been a smooth, gradual decline either:  within the last decade, I went from being at the top of my game (whatever game you can think of) to playing bingo with a hearing aid in the back of a church basement (figuratively).

The bitch of it is, I know how tiresome I am being whenever I launch into a story about the ways things were -- I can see it in my students' and younger colleagues' eyes -- yet I cannot stop myself.  I want them to know.  I have something important to share here: the ways things are compared to the way things were.  I was there!  I know!

It doesn't matter what the topic is:  abortion, feminism, Islam, neighborhoods, technology.  Whatever, I must dive in and insert my historical perspective.  Because that is all I have to offer now.  And I cannot bear to be completely silenced, not yet.