Gilded Age

One of the courses I'm taking right now is Geriatric studies, sort of a combination of gerentology specifically combined with general cultural studies. To be honest, I only took it as a requirement, but it's turned out to be one of the more fascinating of the classes I take. Today the discussion was on the theories of aging, specifically active aging as compared to passive aging, and also things like norms and social roles. I've decided I really think social expectations are quite negative constructs in human life. There is this idea that a person runs along the time line of school, college, uni, workplace, marriage, children, career, etc until death, which fairly specific ages for many of these roles. While this provides structure for a person who can't decide what to do with his or her life, it's quite problematic for someone who doesn't want to live on that time line. For instance, a person who, at forty, still hasn't chosen a career or held a long-term job would often be looked at as irresponsible, but what if he or she is happy that way? What if they have enough to meet their needs? Or a person who does not marry until they are forty-five and gives birth ten years later. That's not unheard of, of course, but it's quite a shock.

I think people should be a lot freer to map their lives according to an internal timeline, rather than trying to jump from point a to b per a script.

My opinion, anyway.

One might expect that anyone choosing to sign up for a world religions elective course would be fairly broad-minded. After all, the point is not to study one faith in depth but to learn some basic facts about major world religions and other less familiar paths. However, there is one fellow in my class who absolutely drives me mad with his refusal to tolerate any teachings that don't stem directly from Protestant Christianity, specifically a fundamentalist/conservative outlook. Today was particularly frustrating, as we've started covering Islam. His reaction to Islam? It's hateful, violent, evil, etc, etc, etc and shouldn't be recognized as a major faith. Basically, he found Islam so intolerant than he didn't want to tolerate it any more. The whole class got hijacked as he proceeded to display all these newspaper clippings from mainly conservative newspapers stating how Islam is wicked and subversive. Apparently, he'd been planning this quite a long time.

Things like this frustrate me terribly, because I've been raised very tolerant of other faiths and I've tried on many religions. My religious upbringing is thoroughly confusing. Here's the long story...

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