It's a pure distortion of AARP's position and the issue of privatizing Social Security. The latest conservative talking point is that seniors are greedy and AARP is bad. The entire editorial is name calling and demonizing AARP as well as distoring the issues. I wrote a letter to the editor responding to this that will never get printed. I thought the most interesting point about his editorial is that Lowry attacks AARP's position but never actually denies that Bush's privatization will reduce benefits for seniors and boost profits for Wall Street.

His stirring conclusion gives you the main idea:

I had to wonder if even conservative seniors wouldn't be offended by Lowry's attack editorial. Well, outside of Orange County California anyway.

By the time a man in our society is economically ready for marriage, he will be in his mid thirties. Such a man will not look to marry someone his own age if he wishes to have children. He, perhaps following instinct, will seek a youger, "prettier" woman who's eggs are fresher. Also a young woman still retains the option if having many offspring, if that option appeals to the man.

The woman who waits till she's over thirty to discover that she wants kids (after 4 billion years of evolution, would YOU call it quits?) will probably squeeze out the obligatory child, maybe two, yet the biological replacement rate is 2.1. If she "has a career", the child is shunted off into a lifetime of stranger-filled institutions. Yet if she does not, the child may (perhaps mercifully) be deprived of a middle-class lifestyle.

When we survey the social family, we find that most misery experienced by our brothers and sisters is self-inflicted, deriving mostly from the maladjustment of man and civilization. The resultant mayhem of the human animal dwarfs the difficulties coming our way from mere nature.

Why? Is it perhaps some imbalance in how we govern ourselves? When we discuss social security, what are we discussing if not the flow of energy from the young to the old? Doesn't it strike you as self-evident that the way of nature is for the flow of energy to be from the old to the young, the flow of time from the past to the future?

"Liberals" having given up completely on thought, prefering knee-jerk reflexes instead, have ceded the battlefield to those who offer a return to a system that worked in the past: perhaps they mean 1950, perhaps they mean 1910, or perhaps they have a more distant age in mind.

Isn't it also self-evident that if a system was perfect in some golden age of the past, it cannot also be perfect for our current situation? Each day you wake up is an unprecedented situation. There have never been more people. Never before have people lived as long. Technology continues to dazzle. I routinely use a supercomputer. It means nothing for me to make novel genes. I have started a project that will try to build upon the technology that ALREADY can translate human thought into computer commands. Do we have the answers for how to live today? Clearly not.

And even if we had the answer, by the time we effected change in the system our "perfect" solution would have become maladaptive. 60 million people essentially said they would rather boldly march to their doom behind a sure-footed leader (Bush), then at least entertain the chance of muddling-through using intelligence and caution (Kerry).

Why do I lament? What would I like you to come away with? It is simply that disputes about social security etc. are trivial in the face of the epochal crisis that we are in. On this planet exists several strata of civilization: nomads, farmers, industrial people, and now the "information" people, like myself. Which cultural mindset will be the guiding light into the future? Will it be the argicultural "Red" states? Will it be the "Blue" defenders of industrial age solutions like social security, labor unions, and national health care? Who represents the current way of life? Who represents the future?

My generation is not even replacing itself! The rich bastards and the concentration of wealth, the loss of jobs to countries with agricultural-age family sizes, and the psychological plague which leads us to skyrocketing diviorce rates, declining marriage rates, drug use and alchohol abuse. We are being genocided. If Hitler passed a law saying Jews would only be allowed to have two children, everyone would AT ONCE see that it was genocide. But if our own government with culture to boot, effects the same result, everyone cheers for a moment before they go back to debating social security!

Qui non proficit, deficit: He who does not advance, declines. If you do not have an answer for the imbalances and unsustainable practices you condemn us to doom. It isn't worth your breath to hunt the internet for examples of "why the other guy is wrong". You, or someone, needs to be right, or else we are doomed.