#WhenIWas15 (And That Was A Long Time Ago!)...

I wanted to be a lawyer and/or commentator-analyst on Fox News. Only the "lawyer" and "Fox News" parts have changed. I still want to be a commentator-analyst, though I'd be a commentator-analyst at anywhere where somebody would see if I'm a voice worth hearing, and I'm also working on becoming an author.

Granted that "anywhere" obviously does not mean anywhere where bigotries and other unjustifiable hatreds prevail. Among the bigotries and other hatreds that would get me to turn down a job offer from any place:

1. Real Sexism—e.g., While being against abortion is not sexist, blaming a woman for becoming pregnant due to being raped and/or being raped in the first place is sexist.
2. Racism and ethnocentrism, especially Anti Semitism—I am Jewish and a fourth- and fifth-generation pogrom survivor; and many of my ancestors and other relatives became Anusim to survive both pogroms and other Anti Semitism.
3. Xenophobia—I don't need, e.g., to hear any assumptions that refugees are simply here to commit crimes or that DACA kids can get to the back of the line just like their parents. After all, my father's paternal grandfather was an equivalent of a DACA kid, and 11 days from now will be the centennial anniversary of when he came here. He didn't even remember anyone whom he saw in family pictures that a family friend would bring back, and he had been deceased for some time when our side of the family handed the deed to the family farm back to a side in then-Soviet Poland. We didn't need anyone's Anti Semitism or xenophobia then, and immigrants of today and their descendants don't need xenophobia now.
4. Ageism—I don't need, e.g., any canards about Millennials. 
5. Heterophobia—I don't need any canards about especially religious heterosexuals like myself. For example, to assume that all religious heterosexuals think that LGBTQ people are just a bunch headed-to-eternal-doom debauchees is heterophobic. So's assuming that all religious heterosexuals think that LGBTQ people choose to be LGBTQ.
6. Real Anti-LGBTQ discrimination—e.g., While being against same-sex marriage is not bigoted, assuming that every LGTBQ person would want to be in any given same-sex relationship is. 
7. Ableism—this one doesn't need any explanation

By the way, I didn't know that I am Jewish when I was 15; and I certainly didn't know that I'm a descendant of illegal immigrants, including the 1908 equivalent of a DACA kid. Now that I know that I'm a Jew and a descendant of a DACA-kid equivalent, I really want to be a commentator-analyst and an author to speak up for B'nei Anusim and others like me, DACA kids, and others. Also by the way, my DACA-kid equivalent great-grandfather turned 15 a century ago next October. and he had no choice as to what he wanted to be—he was only allowed to go as far as eighth grade before he ended up working the coal mines in the only country that he'd ever really known, and still a country that had Anti-Semitic and other bigotries.

A Modified Copied-and-Pasted Facebook Post On Aging

(And no, you don't have to copy and paste. I'm just modifying this a little as I copy and paste it because it's an albe-painful reminder that those of us under 35 are getting older, too).

To everyone whom has come of age and is only aging more and more every day:

We are going through the next stage of our lives. We are at ages at which we see more and more wrinkles, gray hair, and extra pounds. We think about the fact that quite a few of us were just even 25 seemingly yesterday, and just slightly younger than that just as if it were only a few days before that. Now we're either closer to 35 or further away from 35 on the older side of it than we ever thought that we could be in just a short amount of time, and the 25-and-younger crowd will be just like us one day (😢. You do get that old before you know it, and the worst part is getting old as you get older.).

What we once brought to the table with whatever youth and zest for life we had will become either wisdom, experience, and good hearts that older people are expected to have or the haughtiness, stubbornness, and miserliness of the proverbial old fool—"Better is a poor, wise youth than a foolish old king." We've earned each of our gray hairs for either what we've endured or made others endure, too.

Don't think that aging necessarily means being like a classic or like a fine wine, either. Our exteriors may not be what they once were, and any looks that we do retain will either mean nothing or be like the proverbial "gold ring in a pig's snout" if we deliberately forego having (let alone increasing) spirit, courage and strength in entering and exiting the coming chapters of our lives with grace and dignity; and may we never pride ourselves in what we've endured and accomplished—may we be humbled by and learn from it.

May God "[t]each us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom"—especially since we don't know if we have the rest of today, let alone tomorrow and any days thereafter.

Even if you decide to not copy, paste, and modify this with your age and a picture of you, look at the recent-enough picture that I have posted of my currently-28-years-old self and apply Marley's words to Scrooge to how you yourself are aging:

"Look to me no more. Look, that you may remember what has passed."