Do you ever wish you were born earlier ?

I am 57 now , I grew up during the cold war , saw the cuban missile duck and cover , went through the vietnam war , saw the gulf war and then the day of the internet and cell phones and bush all burst on the scene .

I don;t know about others near my age but sometimes I wish I was born just 20 years earlier and I would be able to miss most of this last decade or at least not have to worry about what ten year from now may look like because I don't see a bright future and I am tired .

Much later. At a time that has yet to come...

sigh

How much earlier?
Before anti-biotics, modern dentisty, hygiene and commonly available electrical power? Not me.

I'd rather have been born 100 yrs from now. Things HAVE to be better than this mess we have made for ourselves. I was born the same time that Sputnik was launched, so I am a space aged baby.

October 16, 1968. :silly:

I was due on June 28 but arrived on June 27.

:P

October 17 babies unite

Im 6 years older so at least had full benefit of the sixties. Could've done without the past 5 years though.

But then again, I hate the idea of having to experience the Reagan administration firsthand. I hate the guy enough as it is.

closing in fast on 56, and I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have been born a year or so after my brother instead of ten years later. For one thing, I would have met and talked to some relatives who sound like they were really interesting folks. I would have enjoyed some of the peacefulness of life that I feel our television generation lost. I'm not sure of the future, either, but I figure I can do my part to make sure we have a future....my family tends to live into their 90s (and I'm talking about before there were heart bypasses and stuff like that to prolong life), so it's likely I'll be around for quite a while yet.

I tend to feel a lot of nostalgia for eras in which I did not live, but which give me comfort - so in that way, sometimes I wish I'd been born earlier. However, I'm seeing that through the lens of someone who was born in 1966, so my perspective is entirely different than it would be if I HAD been born 20 or 30 years earlier.

Historically, we live in very interesting times. Warts and all, I wouldn't trade it. Being a teenager during the '80s was worth the price of admission alone.

but I find your commentary very sad. We should embrace our experiences, no matter what they are, no matter when they took place. They make us who we are. They shape our lives. We should welcome these experiences, learn from them.

However to have to go through the 50's and 60's I had hope finally during that time we would progress into a better future . We still had jobs to be found and you could learn on the job without more than a high school education . Also people were not tied to electronic machines as a way to isolate themselves .

By now I would have not to worry about how I would alter myself to fit into the new beaten down workforce just to make it through each month . I would not be an economic end fate .

My parents had if rough when they were young but did find a good life with few changes to really have to deal with before their death . I on the other hand had it fairly easy growing up for the most part but now at this age things are going backward and downhill so this is not a good time .

I don't have the faith many share that politicians will be able to pull us up from this nose dive .

Sure I would have missed the prime time of the 60's which for me was a good time period with exception to the vietnam war . But we are now destroying the country we had and the rest of the world . It's a trade off now that I have experienced these decades I could easily do without .

but I think it's counter productive to wish for things that just can not be, that just can not happen.

Without my experiences, I would not be who I am today, and frankly, I like me, like who I am.

Yes, the world as a whole is not the most pleasant place right now. But it's our world, it's what we have right now.

It may seem overwhelming at times, but I think we should embrace it, deal with it, and change it. At least we can try to change our little portion of the world, at least our little realm.

felt so bleak about the country and worried about her children. She's a Republican who turned against Bush when he invaded Iraq. Her younger brother served as a fighter pilot in Viet-Nam ..he's now in his mid-sixties and is a life long Repuglican and he apparently was so upset about Bush invading Iraq that he's suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder once again. And, this is a guy who never could talk about Vietnam but made a sucessful life for himself...who now is reliving what he worked his way out of.

I think it's very hard on all who lived through Vietnam to see this all come back again. But, being born earlier was no picnic either....The Depression, the Roaring 20's ending in the Crash, the Gilded Age where there was extreme poverty unless one was at the top (like we are headed) and before that the Industrial Revolution with children working in factories and before that the Civil War.

Maybe there just isn't a good time to be born...when one looks back a few decades as to what was behind. :shrug:

Many of us were filled with hope for a brief time that Vietnam would be an end to that kind of war. When the Berlin Wall came down it seemed hopeful. We just didn't count on the Cold Warriors, Neo-Cons aligning themselves with the Religious Right and the rise of Corporate Media. It's hard to know how they could have been stopped.

But, do believe in the ying yang of history. Maybe American's have learned their lessons of Republican greed and need a change ?
If, we have not permamently damaged our environment, the future might be better. In this information age, life can be interesting. Know what you mean about fighting the good fight. We are all tired.

"Everybody says they want to live longer. But I never heard anyone say they want to have been born earlier"?

I was born in 1954, and I have sometimes wished I was born about five years earlier so I would have been coming of age during the summer of love. It seemed that just when I arrived, all the good counterculture years were winding down.

I didn't come of age until 1984.

Summer 1967 - I finally got out of high school, I was about to turn 18, Sgt. Pepper came out.... Talk about perfect timing!

I feel sorry for my niece, having to be 13 now instead of in 1963.

wasn't cable news blasting us with harrowing news 24/7.

Besides, there was war in in the 40's and unemployment in the 30's. Some trade-off.

I think it has been an interesting time. As a female, I would not have wanted the life of a woman 20 years earlier.

I would have been very unhappy to have my options limited.

As sad as it is to say, because we don't have it all that good now, there hasn't been a time in recorded history when women had it better than they do now.

"I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started." - Donald Rumsfeld

I was born 30 years too late. I wear tie dyes, smoke weed, listen to Jefferson Airplane, and am obsessed with politics and social activism. As a teenager, I wanted more than anything to attend my first protest, and when I finally got to, it only inspired me more. I always wanted to go back in time to protest the Vietnam War. Then Bushie came along and I didn't have to. Be careful what you wish for.

And there is absolutely no doubt that as the US moves to 3rd world status, some of us who know how to live without ipods, myspace, cell phones,internet, cable tv, excel, graphing calculators etc, are going to be needed to carry civilization forward.

Unlike the Irish monks who did it on an island, we'll be expected to preserve civilization from nursing homes. :(

In our hopes, dreams, and quaintly archaic educations, we have been entrusted with the enlightenment. Without us what follows us is but a shadow of things that we had a chance to be.

I was born in the late 50's. In my early 20's I was crazy mad in love with a man in his mid 30's. I thought if I was 10 yr's older maybe he would love me back. Eventually I realized he didn't love me because I was fugly.

Eventually though I married another my bestest estest friend and we have done alright.

Not since I quit drinking. . .

I'm quite pleased with where I am -- wouldn't change the times, but maybe some of the events and my reactions to them.


Miniver Cheevy

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would send him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam's neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing:
He missed the medieval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

-- Edwin Arlington Robinson

It's odd... sometimes I get that feeling, yet I think life dealt me a pretty decent notion of what's worth having, and what's rubbish ... so I wouldn't swap it for any other. I'm tired too, but we've plenty of fight left and everthing to play for.

this is the time and place I know. Each time is like that I guess.

Make me around 24-29 right now.

It could be a new beginning (and I truly think it will be). It could be the end. It could be the middle.

Bush is a godsend in a way. What clearer fool to discredit foolishness than Bush? What asshole could better discredit assholishness? It has all happened in the media age, so there is ubiquitous, multi-media, documentary evidence to caution us in the future. It's spooky. I'm optimistic.

Play a harmonica, draw a picture, garden, clean something up. The opportunities are endless.

Perhaps , it's all a crap shoot however . I don;t know if I want to live in a time where everything is a sterile landscape . We can't ever go back now and going ahead is not an adventure in paradise since it now a torn apart time like no other time before . Bush was not blessig , we did not need to be torn down to the bone to see where we could go wrong , if we just looked around a bit past the damn cell phones perhaps we would not be hear in this mess and not wasted so many lives for nothing but yet another so called learning experience . We had enough of these and have not learned a thing so far except how to destroy more effectively .

I've been miserable over it. But it is getting better. I really can't wait to see what happens when the Dems start running Congress. It looks like they are going to be pulling overtime. We are going to hear a lot of the story that has been kept hidden by GOP under-oversight.

It has been an expensive lesson, no question. But it has been a genuinely great lesson -- comparatively far less destructive than World War II, for example, and far more instructive, IMO. We learned we like the planet and don't like global warming; that we don't like knee-jerk wars of adventure; that we don't like people fiddling with the constitution; that we like a wise president, not an imbecile; that we like America being loved, not despised. Most of all, we learned to keep an eye on the government.

However we allowed this to happen , not all of us mind you but the greedy . No matter what the honest people in this country try to do there has always been a military force and a corporate force driving the outcome .

The elections will not change this , they never have . Once you find there is a government that is for the people someone ends up getting killed and there is always a war waiting on the horizon .

If people could finally get along and sustain a fairness and balance that included all then the people would control our destiny and not some industrial military complex or the always corporate greed . the greed filters right down to owners of small companies and now we have great box stores which involves not only greed but off shore corporate interests . This is what we are forced to protect , not only oil .

We have global warming due to corporate greed and weak regulations .

I can tell you one thing , if we have not learned years ago and now with everything so much worse in all aspects , if the people do not all co-operate for the same goals then nothing will change . It will never be the senates 100 members or the congress that will do the representation for the people as it was designed to do , this has never worked long enough without incident and corruption .

We cannot get past race issues or class issues of issues of greed so how do you expect to push forward without all people treated fair and educated with a system that helps those in need to join in the process .

I'm good with any of those.

If I'd been born much earlier I'd probably be dead by now anyway. And since I'm not crazy about witnessing what the future holds I might have preferred being already dead.

and the only conscious thought I've had about my age, and current events, is I feel fortunate to be heading down the hill, rather than heading up.

gone through the Great Depression and WWII and then all the rest that you have gone through.

Like both my father and mother.

Mom's dead now, and with the way everything has gone to hell in a hand basket in the past six years, I don't think my father wants to see much more.

He's a cancer survivor, but he's tired.

All of these battles had been fought, and won.

He never thought he'd see to live his children have to start all over again.


Oh, great, I just dragged everyone down more.

I wish I could summon more optimism right now.

At the time we were coming out of the Depression and then dumped into WWII. But after WWII, there was such great hope. There were a couple of decades of economic affluence where the working class guy could own a home, a car, feed his family and educate his children. There were no real homeless although there were still poor people. We were moving forward to social justice and many of the problems that couldn't be addressed before.

I remember we were looking forward to things getting better and better for our country, then we were dumped into Vietnam, but yet the sixties to me were the greatest of times in the century. I was fortunate enough to be young and able to participate and enjoy the flowering of the creative side of humanity in music, art, science etc. We went to the moon! But the vampires were in the wings lurking to sieze their opportunity to gain power again. It began with Nixon and we really never recovered what we had gained after WWII.

Man, I would have made such a great hippie.

It was such an exciting time, even if it was marred by violence in the south and the death of a great president.

The voice of youth, the voices of women were finally heard, and they CHANGED the world.

Now, when I see young women who don't care enough to vote, and I just want to slap them.

I worry what the future is for our 15 grandchildren.

It's nothing like the innocent times of the 50's and 60's and 70's.

I gave up longing for the olden days.

before the Revolutions: the sexual revolution, the Civil Rights revolution, the Anti-Vietnam-War Revolution, the rock-and-roll revolution. They see the 50's as utopian, as black and white (pun intended.) It seems to have been a Stepford time. The Revolutions were a reaction to that black/white monochromic world, a questioning of everything that had gone before. We are still reaping the benefits and the angsts of those revolutions, but I wouldn't have missed them for the world. Am also in my 50's and fear for the world my small granddaughter will inherit. Would she be better off in the safety/sameness of a 50's world, or should she inherit the rough-and-tumble of the current world? Sigh. For me, there is no choice, but for her, I worry, worry, worry.

In the fifties we had economic security. It was then that we could look forward to mending the social wrongs in our society like racism, sexism and classism. We accomplished a lot of that in the sixties because of our economic security. This is what we have lost today. When people are struggling to survive, social change is hard to achieve but I think this is what the conservative, corporate factions of our society want to further their own greedy interests.

but I feel really bad for my 14/16 year old kids, who will see in their future, the melting of polar ice caps, drought and famine on a heretofore unknown scale, and God only knows what else.

But I wouldn't want to have been born later -- because I would have less experience.

era I think is marked by the largest, fastest amount of destruction of animals and environment than at any other time. It is a difficult time, but I think we are supposed to take on the issues that need to be dealt with. I wish I had some training right out of the womb. Or maybe I did and don't realize it. Rising to my own God-consciousness is not easy for me.

....I hadn't been born during the (first) Nixon administration.

Growing up in the 80's was ok for me.

fight hard and die young.

see if you can make it into a saga.