What saddens me most is how much wisdom and common sense has just simply vanished. Rather than looking to our elders, their values, their customs, their hard-won experience, we look at them with scorn, with a superiority that is neither earned nor deserved. We think and act as though we have finally discovered what every generation before us somehow missed. In our arrogance we have made ourselves unworthy of the wisdom that trickled down through the ages and was handed to us on a gold platter, and like petulant children, we have spit on it.