Today’s turn through my blog roll turned up this little gem from NYU’s Digital Journalism class group blog.

A whippersnapper named Zack Baragan wrote a heartfelt piece entitled “Sometimes You *Can* Be Cool Past Your 30s,” in which he managed to unearth many of the ageist cliches that my generation came up with in the 60s. (Or, horrors, were they actually dreamed up by my elders in the 20s, 30s, 40s 50s????)

My second published piece of writing (my first being instructions for mental tictactoe in our local newspaper) was a Letter to the Editor in which I made a heartfelt plea for the older generation to understand/accept/quit dumping on our music. Even at that tender age–I was fifteen at the time–I had a feeling for cultural critiques. Please understand, I wrote, that every generation’s music is hated by those older; it’s just the way things are, the natural order, so to speak. Your parents thought the Roaring Twenties were the end of civilization, and they weren’t. Nor will be Rock ‘n Roll for our generation.

Now I stand on the other side of the divide, not of the musical chasm that sometimes exists (I actually like rap and know that that Thirty Cents guy needs another two dimes), but of the Young/Old split.  So I’ll speak to just a couple of things this Zack person says:

1. Your title.  Who do you think invented cool?  In my day, we  expected to be dead by the time we were thirty so dreaded was that age.

2. You expected  a “long, scholarly diatribe about blogging by someone who didn’t even ‘get’ it.”   Profiling is profiling, whether it’s racial or gender or age.  

3.  You were shocked that Carr’s attitude toward blogging was much like your own.  Well, duh.  See 2.

4.  …and that he’s willing to “embrace and adapt to this new technology.”  Ummmmmmmmm, how old is Bill Gates???????

5.  “even if they are old enough to remember Woodstock…”  Did you know that Paul McCartney had a band before he was a solo act, all of which was before he was a part of another band called The Beatles?   

So here I am, all these decades later, writing a piece in which I’m imploring an age group to not write off my generation.  What goes around, etcetera.  And one thing I can tell all of you on the other side of the divide is that years hence, you too will be berated for not being…young.