ACT YOUR AGE

ACT YOUR AGE: How Profits, Power, Progress in health care & Changing perspectives impact perceptions of aging on our lives. (The title will make more sense when you read the post.) What has been changing our perspectives on what age means? How do we schedule our lives? How do we make wise decisions concerning age? Why are we getting more impatient? This post is to make us wiser about how we view aging by providing a forward & backward perspective on age perceptions. I remember the frustrations of young men deemed old enough to die in battle or to order other men to their deaths, but considered too young to vote or buy a beer. Our modern culture deems it wise to reward certain privileges to particular ages, why?

STARTING EXAMPLE. To get started, let’s use the example of birthdays. Most everyone except J.W.s, Mennonites & Amish celebrate birthdays. It’s an accepted part of our culture. But the real history might surprise people. Except for famous people, the idea of celebrating someone’s birthday is a 20th century concept. The traditional song “Happy Birthday to you…” (composed by the Hill sisters, & made famous in 1934 by Irving Berlin) is a rather modern innovation. The first birthday card was printed & sold in 1875. The idea of sending a card was marketed by card producers & caught on in the 20th century, & now is a booming business. It wasn’t until the 12th century that parish priests (in Europe) began recording exact dates of birth. Until that time, most people did not know or care when exactly they had been born. The Catholic church, until the Protestant Reformation, held the view that celebrating birthdays was pagan and the custom had died when Christianity superseded the pagan cultures. Now my point is this, for most of history, most people did not pay close attention to exactly how old they were. Even when they knew their date of birth, which many people did in the 1800’s, it was not a day of celebration & gifts. (By the way, the birthday tradition that has developed in Germany is that the birthday person buys everyone else gifts!)

PROBLEMS. While most people assume mankind is progressing with time, some of our perspectives on age have created problems that previous centuries did not face, for instance: the cult of youth, age stereotyping, age segregation, the expectation of youth rebellion, the generation gaps & the state’s control of children. The Illuminati intentionally created the kindergarten schools to separate the children as early as possible from their parents for indoctrination. There are many cultures that don’t experience generation gaps & where it is not the norm for teenagers to rebel. I’ve witnessed Anabaptist communities like that too. Also today, the financial burden of an aging population & decreasing support for an increasingly old population is being discussed. So people are asking if there are limited resources, then how does one prioritize them…should one prolong the elderly at the expense of depriving the new generation of young adults the resources for success?

THE PAST. Let’s look for a moment at the perceptions of age in colonial America. It may shock some people, but it is similar to the old fashioned perceptions of age among the Amish that I know firsthand. When children back then were born, there was no concept that they should be something at a certain age. They had guidelines to stages, but it was an entirely different concept. A child would be weaned when its teeth made it a good idea. A child would progress through his school lessons at his own pace, and it was not uncommon for intelligent 14 year olds to go to college. You could not predict what a child was studying by his age. There were 3 education levels: elementary, secondary, & university; but they were reached by ability not age. By the age of seven, children would begin assuming adult responsibilities. In fact, some saw them as miniature adults. There was no peer consciousness. As families were large, the ages in a family would follow the entire spectrum. A person would interact with people of all ages on a constant basis. So for many reasons, there was no sense of a particular age being a peer group. A boy or girl was someone not married, regardless of age. An unmarried 25 year old was still called a boy. Adulthood came with marriage. Many cultures have rites of passages, at say, puberty. But age in colonial days had little meaning compared to modern day America.

AGENTS OF CHANGE. Government control & socialism was introduced to the public school during the 19th century and the Illuminati played a big role in this happening. In 1840, Henry Barnard gave an important talk about age grouping in the schools, which slowly came in during the 1840-60’s. By the 1870’s age grouping in schools was widespread. Now it is assumed that age grouping is an intrinsic aspect of education. But it is actually a recent innovation. Unfortunately, along with the concept that a certain age was to study a particular lesson, came a decrease in toleration for precocity (fast learning). The intelligent learners in the 20th century began to be held back with their slower peers. Textbooks were written to reflect what was expected by the average student at a particular age to study. Sunday schools were also revamped. The original structure was based on ability. An infant started the first level by practicing the alphabet & easy words. The next Sunday School level was called elementary and was easy reading. (As you may have guessed, Sunday School was geared to teach reading.) The next level was called Scripture, and what you might think…it was reading scriptures. The final level was for deep study of the OT & NT called Senior class. All this was thrown out & replaced with classes based on age. In 1882, a German physiologist Wilhelm Preyer began developmental psychology with his book The Mind of the Child. The govt. got involved in licensing marriages, so by 1906, only 3 states still allowed marriages without state licenses: NY, NJ & SC. The spread of clocks & watches during the 19th century made people more time conscious. Insurance agents, census takers, job applications, & schools made people more age conscious as we went into the 20th century. But these things were not this way in colonial America.

THE FUTURE. My talk last year at the Free Your Mind Conference was how Immortality will be given to the right people in the near future. People are already beginning to make use of things to help gain longevity. As the slogan says: Stay young for the rest of your life. They detoxify, get hormone replacements, exercise right, feed their brains & exercise their brains, and get the right nutrition with enzymes and natural healthy foods. Right now a confusing sea of info makes discovering health a difficult journey. However, the age of your arteries is an important indication of your biological aging. A person’s biological age and one’s chronological age are two different things. Likewise, one’s emotional age and maturity is also a separate issue from one’s chronological age. However, staying emotionally healthy helps with one’s biological aging. If one realizes how drastically our concepts of age and aging have changed in the last 150 years, then one can better grasp that 50 years from now our ideas of age will be completed outdated. If one sees that our perceptions have been manipulated, then it is also not difficult to realize that there will be even more manipulation as the World Order gains more control over how people are educated in the schools, mass media, and by society. Some of the manipulation will be by corporations for profit, as they did with promoting birthday parties & cards.