This is a special July 4th column of Senior Moments, designed to stimulate our thinking instead of our tastebuds. It will stay up throughout the weekend. I hope it stimulates real thinking about the condition of our country and world. It will do little good to celebrate liberty, even, while we ignore the ways we are experiencing its decline.

With all hell breaking loose in just about any area of human interest and activity, can we as seniors, can we somewhow change the subject? Seniors, collectively, have an enormous stock pile of wisdom, experience, insight. Most of the time, however, we are set upon ourselves to recreate, waste time, relax, focus only on us and our immediate gratifications. Isn’t it time we cranked up some of the old parts and raced our engines toward something other than a Sunday afternoon drive?

My first real question is why do we call them butterflys? Butter works, but why the fly part? Sounds like a creation oxymoron. Flys are pests. Butterflys are a touch of heaven. This is not really a point I choose to push all the way to the linguistic courts, but it seems it needs some rethinking.

Butterflys, as all know from early educational training, go through a metamorphosis. The question is “doesn’t everything?”

Reports and studies out this week suggest that by the year 2050, longer than my remaining expected life span, those 65 and older will number one out of six. It gets better. There has been a rise in the number of seniors by 23% since 2000. Our present numbers run to 516million. Now, for the really good news: Medicare will likely be insolvent by 2017.

For those of us now in retirement, even those in their late 50′s, none of this information bodes too well. It will, to one degree or another, affect us all. Unless, which is like “if”, things change. The prospect of that, given current indicators does not seem too encouraging.

The grayest continent in the world is Europe. The youngest is Africa. Shifts in population growth are occuring by

For seniors who have grown weary with all the bad, downright negative, personality obsessed news these days, a new stimulus plan is being recommended just for us: QUIT WATCHING THE NEWS!  There is so little of any consequence that missing it can’t really ruin your day.  My custom of watching the news has been significantly curtailed, since [...]