Written by: Phyllis Ann Doros
Copyright � 1967
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They Say I Can Stay Young

Phyllis, Madelon + Rayetta -1954

       Our culture is preoccupied with youth.  Twenty years ago the

advertising slogan  �Wash the gray away�  might have referred to a

Monday morning laundry chore;  today it refers to a prematurely gray

wife who can recapture her husband�s affection by tinting her hair.

Thirty years ago a good tooth paste cleaned the teeth; now there is

a dentifrice on the market that  �gives you sex appeal.� �After

using it,�  the announcer insists,  �everything else is just tooth

paste.�  On bill-boards, on magazine and paper-back covers, in motion

pictures, in every conceivable type of advertisement, from the radio,

from the television, from loud, insensitive recordings -- all we

see and hear stresses one issue:  To be glamorous, to be attractive,

to be accepted and wanted, one must be young.  Our mass-media

advertising techniques may be excessive and in bad taste, but they

cannot be blamed for our unhealthy absorption.  They have not diverted

our attention, they have simply intensified it.  They are promising

us what we have always wanted to hear:  We can stay young!  We can

become eligible for social security without acquiring facial lines

or any gray hairs.  The methods may be new; the fear of aging is as

old as man himself.  We have been victimized, not by the agency

men with slogans, not by the manipulators and satisfiers of public

appetites, but by our own gullibility.

       Despite such flagrant assurances of rejuvenation, or perhaps

because of them, no one seems to know how to be young anymore, least

of all the young.  Our teen-agers have little spontaneity and even

less imagination to entertain themselves.  I feel more sorrow for

Dr. Leary�s audience, trying pathetically to reflect a modern image,

than I do for Dr. Leary, who -- after a lengthy opportunity to

examine the implications and seek the benefits of contemporary

society -- chooses to offer the remnants of our civilization on the

altar of L.S.D. and juvenility.  Aging men who chase the elusive

fountain of youth are to be pitied; but the young who fail to

appreciate the sweet nectar as it seeps through their lips are to

be mourned.  Like spring, youth is a natural state, heedless of

conditions set down by the receivers.  The magic heyday of adult

privilege combined with youthful competence and care freeness has

no strings, either to pull it to us sooner than the normal time, or

to delay its appointed departure.

       And, contrary to the blaring commercial messages, youth has its

disadvantages.  Youth can be a tired, middle-aged foot trying to

squeeze into a shoe with a severely pointed toe.  Youth can be an

expensive dress that Is too short for comfortable sitting.  Youth

can be heavy stretch ski-pants worn on a hot July afternoon by someone

who has yet to visit a ski-slope.  Youth can be a hideous abuse of

melody and a violent disregard for rhyme.  In short, youth can be

ridiculous.  I must agree with the person who wrote,  �We are like

flies that crawl on the pure and transparent mucous-paper in which

the world like a bon-bon is wrapped.�  The bon-bon world with which

we are obsessed is an artificial, unobtainable youth that would

fall away to dust, like glorified preserved mummies, if we ever

broke through the transparent protection.  And flies who discover

the unreality of the sealed package spend their time looking at

other flies, rather than staring into an illusory magnifying glass

which magnifies nothing.

Phyllis, Jim + Ryan -1989


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