Thursday, October 12, 2006 at 4:42 AM EDT
“Respect your elders”. “Wisdom comes with age”. I’ve heard people speak those words throughout my lifetime as i am sure others have. However, i strongly disagree with those words.
Just because someone is a little bit or a lot older than one does not mean that they automatically deserve their respect. And wisdom does come with age for some but definitely not for all. I learned that fact early on as a very young child. And it is a fact!
Grown ups had said and done things to me that wasn’t correct and right.
If i knew a little more about something than they did they didn’t want to hear it because in their mind they believed that they were the adult who knew better when in actuality they didn’t know what they were talking about. Often when a particular child, teen, or even young adult is knowledgeable and goes to express an idea or solution that someone older may not see, realize, or grasp the first thing that older person may be quick to verbalize is that the younger person is being “fresh” or “think that he or she knows everything”. And then continues on with “they’ll learn”.
They are very quick to generalize as most people do. It is not fair but it sometimes happens.
It’s been said and i’ve been told all throughout my life by those who have been able to recognize that i am too smart and that i know a lot for my age and that they were nowhere near the level that i’m on when they were at my age. There are decent rational adults out there who don’t have any problem acknowledging and accepting that people younger than them can know just as much as they do and even a little more.
You see, i have always carried a portion of wisdom. I have a good share of it. And i am very wise in ways that a lot of people don’t appreciate. There have been some who’ve misjudged me, accused me of things that i was not guilty of, lied on me, underestimated me, and treated me unfairly. There have been plenty of older peoples asses that i have wanted to kick. A lot of them make me so sick about how they think or thought that they were enlightening me by telling me something while all of the time i was way ahead of them.
Of course, there are those who are informative and beneficial to learn a little or a lot from. They are very helpful and they are the ones that i respect if they genuinely have understanding.
There have been older people who have tried to hurt me, test me, run games on me and so on because they believed and thought that they were so much more experienced.
And you see, that goes back to them making generalizations. Everybody is not the same but you can’t tell them that. So many of them have got it stored in their minds that they’ve been around and that they know and are able to read every type of person that they come across when they don’t know shit! They just think they do. And those are assholes that some of us are just going to run into at sometime or another. They are too ignorant to realize that it is not always necessarily age that makes you wiser but it is the insight and the “individual” experience. And just because one has the age does not mean that they have all of the experience.
A lot of people have gone through life living with the wrong information and mistaking one thing for another so when a younger person comes along knowing the answers he or she is sometimes considered as the one who is misguided, naive, or confused due to their own form of “misguidance”. And when some do come to a realization they are too embarrassed to admit to it.
There are plenty of younger people who indeed are naive, confused, and don’t know a whole lot about life and some of them are just stupid because their parents are stupid. But out here in the world there are older people who can learn from the young and the young who can learn from the old.
Our world is continually changing and while many things continue to change many of the things are going to remain the same.
I have a number of reasons why i don’t have respect for people just because they are older than me. Now that doesn’t mean that i go around disrespecting them. There is a difference between being courteous and having true respect for someone. I just do not underestimate anyone because they are younger than me and i do not overestimate someone simply because they are older. I go by the person within.
Nevertheless, i am aware that maturity also plays a part when it comes to certain people and their age.
