Senior Citizens and Junk Mail

While perusing one of my favorite blogs this morning, I came across a statement recently made by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). Sen Reid told his Senate colleagues that – while most of the parcels delivered today are “what some people refer to as junk mail,” it remains elderly American’s “love to get junk mail” and feel that it’s “their only way of communicating or feeling like they’re part of the real world.”

I am so sorry to hear that Sen Reid's life is so empty he loves to get junk mail. It must be, or he wouldn't make a statement like this. He probably welcomes telemarketers to call his home (preferably at dinner time), too. How very fulfilling it must be for him to get a telephone call from a "real human being" to make him feel part of the world. His email box filled daily with spam must be a real joy for him. Surely he has his spam filter turned off so he doesn't miss one tiny morsel of what the world has to offer him.

And if his statement is true, shouldn't we be inundating nursing homes with this stuff? I'll gladly donate all of mine. After all, it makes seniors so happy! And this way, all the trees used to produce the paper for this bilge could be saved!

I, for one, find junk mail one of the banes of my senior existence. Call me crazy, but I am so sick of people trying to sell me Medicare supplement plans and auto insurance. Anything that arrives in my mailbox that has bulk rate postage on it goes unopened right into a special file I keep -- the trash can. Thank goodness for today's caller I.D. on phones. Except for the interruption of what I am doing at the moment to have to check the number, I no longer have to deal (politely or impolitely) with these intruders. Funny thing is,if their message is so unimportant why don't they ever leave a message?

Today's seniors are active, fulfilled human beings and for him to categorize us as vacuous beings looking forward to the daily onslaught of marketing materials is laughable.