Age Is An Accumulation Of

[e]very Time You Think The Entertainment Moguls Have Hit Rock Bottom, They Reach For The Jackhammer And Rat-a-tat-tat A Little Deeper.

We Criticize Mothers For Closeness. We Criticize Fathers For Distance. How Many Of Us Have Expected Less From Our Fathers And Appreciated What They Gave Us More? How Many Of Us Always Let Them Off The Hook?

On Television, Journalists Now Routinely Appear On Talk-shows-with-an-attitude Where They Are Encouraged To Say What They Think About Something They May Not Have Finished Thinking About.

Every Thing, Even The So-called Timesaving Device And Energy-efficient Machine, Comes These Days With An Elaborate Set Of Instructions For Its Care And Feeding. Buying A Machine Has Become More And More Like Buying A Pet. ... We Are Time-crunched. Not Just By The Number Of Things We Have To Do, But The Number Of Things We Have. In The Late Twentieth Century, Things Have Become Our New Dependents.

Civility, It Is Said, Means Obeying The Unenforceable.