"I've gotten old and there's no going back."

That was simply and beautifully written. Your gave me some perspective on life. I'm in my early twenties and I often feel that conservative people are "mean" because they could care less about my values, but I guess we're all here in a changing world; we have more in common than we think. It gets easy to feel alienated, but remember that the news isn't an arcuate assessment of what the world is really like. There are lots of people on this planet.