The trouble with seniors separating themselves off from the rest of us, is that they are a powerful voting bloc. I have seen it over and over: some referendum on the ballot that would generate more money for the schools, and it gets defeated, apparently because that voting district has a large number of retirees who have no children in the schools. Whereas if they were participating in the community, they would realize that the overall quality of the community is improved by stronger schools, even for those who do not currently have school-age children.
As I thought about that 55+ community, I remembered a senior citizen I knew in my early teen years. She and I were different in more than age -- she and her husband were Portuguese immigrants, I was American born and raised; they had grown up farming, I had grown up in the suburbs. But she and I shared a passion for houseplants. I still have an amaryllis she gave me all those years ago. I also remember her husband showing me the Portuguese way to kill a chicken (it would be many years before I went vegetarian), letting the blood drain into the still-attached head. I am glad those two did not sequester themselves away in a 55+ community.
The world needs all its generations. How much poorer my life would be, were I to associate only with my fellow Gen-Xers. I look at the next younger generation -- they have been called Generation Y. They are the ones who, after all the work of writing a computer program, will put it on the Internet as shareware or freeware, rather than retain copyright and profit from it. For all our disillusion with the materialism we grew up with (we are the children of the 80s, after all), my generation on the whole never made that particular breakthrough. As frustrating as it can be sometimes, having to keep starting over, the hidden blessing is the frequency with which I find myself in a workplace where my professional peers are the younger generation; I find I learn as much from them as I do from my elders.
The 55+ generations still have much to offer, and it would be a tragedy if all of them retreated into their own seperate communities.
