“Women’s faces are rated as more attractive than men’s, even by other women, but the perceived gap declines with age and all but vanishes by the time people reach their 80s, researchers have said.”
To restate this in a single sentence: All but the most elderly women are, on average, more visually appealing than most men.
This generalization will simultaneously upset a certain kind of feminist, the sex-starved zealots from the manosphere, as well as the sexless “gender-neutral” crowd.
But it’s true. This is something I discerned decades ago. It was the early 1980s. I was an adolescent boy who was just starting to “notice” girls and women. I was at the grocery store, and I spotted the seductively attractive woman on that month’s cover of Cosmopolitan.
There was a seductively attractive woman on the cover of Cosmopolitan every month, I observed. Often these women were clad in revealing attire. These were images that the average heterosexual man would find very attractive.
Cosmopolitan, though, isn’t a girly magazine aimed at horny men. The target market of Cosmopolitan has always been heterosexual women.
But at the same time, the covers of Cosmopolitan were always adorned with photos of attractive women.
Cosmopolitan, May 1980
What gives? I wondered.
Gradually, I understood. Even heterosexual women would rather look at images of other women than at just about any man.
(Here’s another piece of magazine trivia from long ago. In the mid-1970s, they came out with Playgirl, a magazine that was supposed to be the women’s equivalent of Playboy. The magazine attracted almost no female readership (though some women did consider it a novelty/joke). The only demographic who read Playgirl in significant numbers were gay men.)
Neither one of them is much to look at. Sure, you could make the case that both Bailey and Krasinski are “less ugly” than I am. But I can’t think of a reason why any human eye would linger on either of these two men for a second longer than necessary.
This is one reason why, as a thoroughly average-looking man, I have never been particularly sensitive about my looks. I may not be much to look at. But neither is that other guy.
I know some people in the restaurant business. The latest challenge for restaurateurs is coping with requests from dog fanatics, er, owners who want to bring their canines into human dining facilities. A friend of mine in Pittsburgh recently sent me a photo of a man who brought his dog into a dining facility without asking anyone for permission. (And the dog wasn’t a service dog.)
This is illegal in most states. Yet entitled dog owners often insist on dining in public with their pooches nonetheless.
At the same time, there is a growing prejudice against children—actual humans—in dining facilities. According to a recent article at FoxNews, 75% of diners now believe that restaurants should offer some form of “adults only” dining—no children allowed.
WTF?
I don’t have children; and at the age of 57 it’s unlikely at this point that I ever will. Nor am I one of those adults who gets giddy and silly every time I see a child. I see children as younger humans, no more, no less.
Yes, there are times when children fail to conform to the exact behavioral standards of adults. If you walk into a restaurant and there is a birthday party for five-year-olds at the next table over, don’t expect to have a quiet dinner.
But that is the exception rather than the rule. I see children in restaurants all the time, and only rarely are they disruptive. In my entire life (and remember, I’m 57 years old) I have had to ask a parent to control their unruly child in a restaurant exactly once.
In most cases, the presence of children simply isn’t that big a deal. And I reiterate: I’m a 57-year-old man who has never had children. I was an only child myself. If anyone is preconditioned to be allergic to kids, it’s me.
We’ve become just a little bit too precious—and our priorities are more than a little askew—if a significant number of us now seeks to ban children from public spaces.
And at the same time, the push to bring slobbering, excrement-dropping, panting dogs into restaurants?
This is insane.
(And just to clarify: despite the tone of the above paragraph, I have nothing against dogs, or dog owners, per se.
I do, however, object to neurotic dog culture as it’s manifested in the third decade of the 21st century. Like so much else in our society at present, dog culture has been taken to ridiculous extremes.)
To put this in perspective: the U.S. was 80% white in 1980. I was 12 years old that year.
This is the kind of study that is politically charged, of course. If you fall to one side of the political continuum, you’re supposed to clap your hands and cheer for all the diversity. Yippee! If you identify with the other side, you’re supposed to lament this as the inevitable downfall of the USA.
To bring this back to me: I’ll be 82 years old in 2050. So whether this turns out to be a good thing or a bad thing, all the rest of you can work it out.
But I wouldn’t get too excited about this study one way or the other in 2026. 2050 is a long way off. A lot of things could happen between now and then that could change this predicted outcome—or reinforce it.
For example, immigration from abroad could be completely cut off. Or…it could double or triple.
Childbearing rates could change, too. That’s one thing to keep in mind when they’re talking about low birth rates. Low birth rates are never more than one generation away from reversing. The postwar Baby Boom generation kind of proved that. The childbearing young adults of 2040 aren’t even in junior high yet. They may all decide that they want to have five kids.
In 1979 my sixth-grade science teacher predicted that within 10 years, everyone in the USA would be using the metric system for everything. Because the metric system was the wave of the future!
That means that all those gallons, feet, and inches should have gone away before 1990. Guess how that turned out? I purchased gasoline by the gallon just this afternoon, in 2026. I bought a dozen eggs, too. And young Americans, who weren’t even born in 1979, reflexively give their height and weight in feet and pounds.
Take all predictions with a grain of salt. Especially predictions of outcomes that won’t show up for decades.
Night Ranger was one of my favorite bands of the golden age of MTV, long before music degenerated into grunge, then rap, and now Taylor Swift. (Barf.)
Night Ranger’s music was not innovative in the manner of Rush or Yes. But it was accessible, the sort of music that you wouldn’t mind listening to on a long drive.
The band was also remarkably consistent over multiple albums. I became a fan with Dawn Patrol (1982), then followed the group through Midnight Madness (1983), 7 Wishes (1985) and Big Life (1987).
I’m gratified to know that the band is still touring, and that three of the original members—Jack Blades, Kelly Keagy, and Brad Gillis—are still with the group.
I like Night Ranger’s music for its own sake, but I won’t deny a certain nostalgic pull. These songs bring back the 1980s for me every time I play them. Good music from a better, bygone time.
Brett Arnold of Yahoo! is distinctly unimpressed with the latest, endless installment in the Star Wars franchise:
“‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ is easily the worst Star Wars movie, but even calling it a movie feels like giving it more credit than it deserves. It’s a feature-length episode of streaming-era television, and boy, does it look and feel like it. It’s uncinematic in pretty much every way, from the drab visuals to its repetitive structure that lacks the storytelling heft needed to make the jump from TV to film. Say what you will about ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ or the prequel trilogy; at least they’re movies!”
Reading the above, I feel a little like the lead singer in the J. Geils Band, who discovered that his high school sweetheart had been turned into onanistic fodder for a girlie magazine:
Star Wars was amazing when it first came out. I can say this with certainty because I was there at the beginning.
It was the summer of 1977 and I sat with my dad in a cinema in northern Kentucky as the very first Star Wars film began.
I was nine years old.
I will soon be 58.
I’m sure you caught the irony. That was almost half a century ago.
The last Star Wars movie that was really necessary was Return of the Jedi in 1983. I remember watching The Phantom Menace in 1999, sixteen years later. It didn’t feel like Star Wars.
Since then, the movies have only gotten worse. It’s obvious that Disney is just milking the Star Wars universe as one of its few reliable cash cows.
Star Wars was great! But it’s time for new science fiction stories and fresh space operas.
I have a new release: Family Secrets. Here’s what it’s about (Amazon description):
“When a Cincinnati businessman connects with a distant cousin on Facebook, he agrees to stop by the man’s remote rural property on his way home from a business trip.
The visit should have lasted thirty minutes.
Instead, he finds himself trapped in a doublewide trailer deep in the woods, drawn into the disappearance of a local girl, and forced to search a dark pond for a body that may—or may not—be there.
But something else is moving through the woods that night.
Something ancient and hungry.
Family Secrets is a supernatural mystery/thriller inspired by regional folklore, nightmares, and the eerie landscapes of the Midwest.”
This is the second book in a new series I’ve created: Uncanny Ohio:
“Uncanny Ohio is a series of atmospheric supernatural tales set in southern Ohio, in and around the Cincinnati area. Traditional ghost stories and urban legends with a strong regional flavor.”
This was a natural move for me. Many of my supernatural stories are set in southern Ohio, and take inspiration from the ghost stories and urban legends that I absorbed as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s.
Family Secrets is currently enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.
In the spring of 1986 I was a senior in high school. My honors English teacher, Mrs. Bollmer, assigned our class Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play, Cyrano de Bergerac. As part of the study of the play, we also watched the 1950 film adaptation starring José Ferrer.
Since I was a 17-going-on-18-year-old boy, I naturally focused on the play’s romantic plot, the homely Cyrano’s pursuit of the lovely but vapid Roxane, who is in love with the handsome but vapid Christian de Neuvillette. (Note for male readers: Cyrano’s method of wooing Roxane is not likely to yield any more satisfying a result in the real world than it did in the play.)
The awkward love plot is a necessary contrivance for a stage drama. What Cyrano de Bergerac is really about, though, is finding your individuality—and personal integrity—in an anonymizing world that seeks to crush both.
And in this regard, the play is relevant to everyone: men, women, the old, the young, and everyone in between.
This theme was certainly relevant in 1986, but that was long before the internet, social media, or the culture wars as we know them today. American culture, politics, and intellectualism were not without their flaws in those days, but they were generally better than they are today.
Take politics. When I was a young man, I thought that I was a liberal. As I entered full adulthood, I thought that I was a conservative. In the political landscape of 2026, I am simply an outsider. My opinions won’t please the personality cult of the MAGA base; nor would I fit in among the lemmings on Bluesky, who compliantly use unnecessary neologisms in the name of political correctness.
In the words of Shakespeare’s Mercutio, “A plague o’ both your houses!”
Listen to Cyrano’s monologue above (from the 1950 film adaptation). Now, more than ever, you need to find your inner Cyrano. Acquiescence to the whims and default opinions of the crowd probably wasn’t a good idea even in 1986. But today such acquiescence is toxic, and destructive to both the individual and society.
The so-called “Gen Z stare” has attracted a lot of attention in the media recently, especially in regard to workplace situations.
The Gen Z stare is a vapid, amused, or annoyed look that young people sometimes give their elders. And in the workplace, most of the management team is going to be over forty and therefore an “elder”.
I’m not sure that there is really anything new here. Watch a teen movie from the 1980s. You will see teenagers from the Reagan era giving older adults similar looks (often accompanied by eye rolls). Keep in mind: those teenagers of the 1980s are now late middle-aged adults in their 50s and early 60s.
The point being: young people have always believed that older people are fuddy-duddies, not current, old-fashioned. If those adults would only get with it, already!
Older people have always believed that young people are too arrogant, and need to spend more time learning the way things are done, versus expressing their opinions.
Both viewpoints are right and both viewpoints are wrong. It depends on the context. The tug between tradition and change is as old as civilization itself.
But in the workplace, the situation is less ambiguous. The workplace is not going to change for the new hire right out of college. Change is going to happen in the opposite direction.
That’s why I’m not a fan of videos like the one recently published by MS NOW, entitled “Did You Just Get the Gen Z Stare at Work? This is Why.”The video asserts that today’s young adults were brought up in a “participatory” culture, and—therefore— don’t cope well with “hierarchy”.
Here’s a newsflash: you could have said more or less the same thing about young adults entering the workplace in 1990. Here’s another newsflash: those young adults of 35 years ago had to change and adapt to the workplace. Today’s young adults will have to change and adapt, too.
The workplace, whether we like it or not, is all about hierarchy. Just ask anyone who’s ever held a job for any length of time.
Back in the 1980s, Pizza Hut was one of my favorite places to eat. I ate at several local Pizza Huts here in Cincinnati with my parents, my friends, and some dates.
Even back then, Pizza Hut was a national franchise. (In fact. I think it was already an international franchise). But Pizza Hut was distinctive, atmospheric, and wonderfully quirky. Those glass light fixtures, and the red-and-white checkered tablecloths. The arcade games in one corner.
And then the MBAs ruined Pizza Hut, as the MBAs ruined so much of American business.
Some time around the turn of this century, corporate management teams in multiple restaurant chains decided that restaurants should lose their distinctiveness, and aim for a stripped-down, ultra-modern corporate look. The idea seemed to be that restaurants should mimic the Apple Store.
Suddenly, Pizza Hut wasn’t a fun place to eat anymore. Ditto for others. Very few fast food restaurants provide anything approaching an immersive experience nowadays.
There have been some notable consumer backlashes. Last year, customers expressed their vehement disapproval on the internet when the corporate pointy heads decided that it was time to give Cracker Barrel a makeover. Cracker Barrel’s management team promptly backpedaled.
As the attached video from CBS shows, a Pizza Hut in rural Pennsylvania has discovered a new formula for success. That formula turns out to be—lo and behold— going back to the distinctive Pizza Hut decor, menu, and layout of the 1980s.
The video also mentions that the store has brought Pac Man back. This is a nice touch, but I don’t think it’s necessary for every restaurant chain to literally go back to the 1970s and 1980s. For example, those famous (or infamous, depending on your viewpoint) aluminum ashtrays are not coming back to McDonald’s in an era of smoking bans. And I’m okay with that. We can leave the aluminum ashtrays (and all the second-hand smoke) in the Reagan era.
But there are a lot of good things that should be brought back to national restaurant chains—wonderful elements of well-known brands, that were eliminated in the name of nonsensical “modernity”.
Every restaurant should not look the same. And restaurants certainly shouldn’t look like the Apple Store.
Ted Turner passed on May 6 after a long, busy life. While his enterprises were numerous, he is best remembered for the Cable News Network, aka CNN, which launched on June 1, 1980.
Most of us did not get CNN right away. Even middle-class households were slow to adopt cable. Americans really did believe that we could exist with access to only four or five television stations in those days.
My parents purchased a cable subscription with CNN included in 1982. For many years, CNN included a partner channel called CNN Headline News. The idea was simple: all the major headlines in thirty minutes.
CNN has become controversial in recent years, depending on one’s political sentiments. President Trump has repeatedly referred to the network as “fake news.” Early on, CNN was mostly apolitical and mostly dedicated to reporting the news in an objective manner. There were no significant controversies like that back then.
On the contrary, pretty much everyone believed that there was something amazing about CNN. Prior to that, if you wanted to watch the news, you had to tune in right around dinnertime. The local news ran from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m., and the national news ran on each major network afterward.
Either that or (gasp!) read the newspaper. Most Americans had longer attention spans in those days, and actually didn’t mind reading the newspaper, but that’s another topic for another day.
I watched CNN sporadically during the 1980s, but I was a high school kid for most of that period. My CNN obsession began in 1989, with the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing. About a year after that came the first Gulf War. For both events, I was tuned in to CNN multiple times throughout the day.
Bad things happened before CNN became common in American homes. There were wars, government scandals, and troubling international events like the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981.
Although I was a kid then, I don’t believe that most American adults ignored national and global problems. There was, however, a commonly held belief that attention was best directed closer to home. Plenty of Americans were dismayed at Nixon’s corruption, or Carter’s bumbling, but there was generally less outrage about the news.
Maybe this was because there were fewer news broadcasts to consume. (And this was long, long before the internet or social media). This made faraway events, including events taking place in another American city, genuinely remote.
It’s also worth noting that in 1980, almost all American adults of childbearing age were married. Most had children. Their personal lives were full and demanding.
This is another way in which 2026 is far removed from 1980. Nowadays, only about a third of young American adults are married, and even fewer have children.
Perhaps that makes it easier to sell them on the notion that the news is more important than their daily lives, that events in Washington DC are more urgent and pressing than events taking place in their living rooms.
Sadly, for all too many Americans in 2026, that is genuinely the case.
I was born in 1968. I did not go to school with a single boy named Ryan.
Thirty-odd years later, I was in the workforce. I met a lot of younger men (born in the mid- to late-1970s) named Ryan.
This was odd. Where had all these Ryans come from? And where had they been before, during my childhood, teens, and twenties?
The mid-1970s surge of boys named Ryan is an example of how generational naming patterns can turn on a dime. From the 1950s through the end of the 1960s, the following male given names were much more popular for newborns in the United States:
Mike/Michael
David
John
Mark
Scott
Steve/Steven
Kevin
Jeff/Jeffrey
The sudden (and relatively short-lived) increase in American babies named Ryan can be partly attributed to two factors: the popularity of the actor Ryan O’Neal (1941-2023), and the debut of the soap opera Ryan’s Hope in 1975. So if you’re an Xennial man named Ryan, it’s likely that you owe your name to a soap opera. The popularity of the name Ryan tapered off in the mid-1980s, right around the time that the soap opera’s ratings started to decline.
My name, Edward, was uncommon among boys my age. I was named after my father. Over the years, I have heard various explanations for the reason my father was given this name. None of them are entirely satisfactory. Edward is certainly not a family name for our clan, in any meaningful sense.
When I was a kid, I would sometimes meet adults who delighted in telling me about Mister Ed, the 1960s sitcom that featured a talking horse of the same name. They would then imply that I might have been named after the sitcom’s eponymous equine.
Despite my youth, I was quick to disabuse them of such notions. (Oh, the traumas that children had to endure at the hands of adults, before the advent of the “self-esteem” craze.)
My mother was born in 1946. She was named Linda—like more than a million other women born in that era. Linda was a much overused name during the Baby Boomer birth years. Linda was, in fact, the second most popular name for newborn girls during the 1940s, according to the Social Security Administration’s online database.
Throughout my life, I have met many Boomer women named Linda. I have never, so far as I can remember, met a woman my age or younger named Linda; but I don’t doubt that they exist.
When I try to think of any Linda who doesn’t have Baby Boomer associations, the only one who comes to mind is Linda Barrett, the fictional sexpot of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).
But once again, there are Baby Boomer connections. Even though Fast Times at Ridgemont High is regarded as an early Gen X movie, the movie’s director, Amy Heckerling, born in 1954, is solidly in boomer territory. (Heckerling is closer in age to my parents than to me.) I think it’s safe to say that the name “Linda” belongs entirely to the Baby Boom generation.
The most popular girls’ name in the 1940s was Mary. Mary was my maternal grandmother’s name. She was born in 1922. I have never met a woman my age or younger named Mary, either. I have met some Mary Jo’s who were born in the 1960s and 1970s, but never a plain old Mary. Once again, I am sure that they exist; but they are comparatively rare.
Kayla is a girl’s name that came out of nowhere in the 1990s. One never encountered the name when I was a kid. I began meeting Kaylas around 2010, just as the first girls given that name were reaching early adulthood. I have nothing against the name Kayla, but what’s wrong with its more traditional analog, Katie?
Among Gen X girls, Jennifer is the most popular name, hands down. Jennifer was already becoming popular when I was born, in the late 1960s. But Jennifer really surged in popularity in the early 1970s. It is the most common name for American girls born in that decade.
This is why there are so many 50-something women nowadays named Jennifer. Jennifer Aniston (born in 1969) is just one drop in that vast ocean of Jennifers.
I went to school with more Jennifers than I can count. Later in life, I met many more who were just a few years younger than me (born in the first half of the 1970s).
I seem to have been surrounded by Jennifers from the very beginning. My mother informed me that when I was a newborn, the couple living in the apartment unit next to my parents had a two-year-old girl named—lo and behold—Jennifer.
The girl had especially wide, blue eyes. She was also fond of staring at adults, according to my mother’s telling. My mother therefore nicknamed her Jennifer Big Eyes. Over the years, Jennifer Big Eyes has come up in conversation from time to time.
Jennifer Big Eyes would now be, I would guess, in her early 60s. I don’t believe my mother ever knew her full name. I have no idea where she would be nowadays, or if she is even still alive. After that many years, anything is possible. But I do hope that Jennifer Big Eyes is still out there somewhere, and that she is doing well. One more Gen X Jennifer among so many.
A married woman in the suburbs develops a sudden and inexplicable interest in graveyard photography. Her husband wonders what’s going on with her.
But what secrets is her husband hiding?
Such is the setup of Involuntary Deeds, my new supernatural/psychological horror novella. The novella is set in Clermont County, Ohio, about twenty miles east of Cincinnati.
Involuntary Deeds is presently available on Amazon. It will be rolled out to the other major retailers (Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Apple Books) in the coming weeks.
Amazon description:
Some crimes don’t stay buried.
Pam Vance never cared about cemeteries—until the day she couldn’t stay away from them.
What begins as a strange new hobby quickly turns into something else. An obsession. A need to photograph graves she’s never seen before… places she feels drawn to.
Her husband, Robert, knows something is wrong.
Then the warnings begin.
The ghost of a Revolutionary War soldier appears to Robert with a message he can’t ignore: stay away.
But Pam won’t stop.
Because one grave is calling to her—that of a sixteen-year-old girl who died in 1991. A death long forgotten.
But not by Robert.
As the past closes in, a truth buried for decades begins to surface—pulling the living and the dead toward a confrontation that can no longer be avoided.
‘Involuntary Deeds’ is a novella for fans of classic ghost stories in the tradition of Peter Straub, Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, and E.F. Benson.
In the spring of 1986, many Americans were following events in the Soviet Union. The new man in the Kremlin was Mikhail Gorbachev, a young (by Soviet standards) leader who was eager to reform the Soviet system. Gorbachev also sought better relations with the West.
I was a senior in high school in 1986. I was interested in the Soviet Union, too. I was old enough to remember the final Cold War tensions of the late 1970s and early 1980s: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the downing of KAL 007. But now, a new world seemed to be in the making.
Then, on April 26, there was a major nuclear accident at Chernobyl, in an area of the Soviet Union then commonly known as “the Ukraine”.
The Kremlin tried to cover it up (of course). The Kremlin had covered up similar disasters in the past (including one at a biological weapons facility in a remote part of the USSR). But this was too big to conceal.
Chernobyl would be in the news for months—years—afterward. The problem still hasn’t gone away completely.
In retrospect, the Chernobyl disaster (which sprung from Soviet ineptitude) was the first sign that Western optimism about the USSR in the mid-1980s was misplaced.
Forty years have passed since then. The former Soviet lands are still the source of mostly bad news. Case-in-point: the war between Russia and Ukraine, now in its fifth year.
It is not quite summer, if you want to get technical about it. Summer will not officially begin until Sunday, June 21, 2026.
We are still in April. The schools won’t let out for another six weeks.
But the mercury here in southern Ohio will hit 85 degrees today. That’s close enough for me.
The above is one of my early short stories, “The Wasp”. I wrote it back in 2009, and it was first published in my short story collection, HAY MOON AND OTHER STORIES.
This is very much a summertime story. It’s also based my lifetime loathing of wasps. I can handle spiders, snakes, and other creepy-crawlers (to a point, anyway). I love honeybees.
But I absolutely despise wasps.
As the old German proverbs goes, “God made the bee, but the devil made the wasp.”
In the late summer of 1986, I signed up for Selective Service, aka “the draft”. I had just turned 18, and this was the law.
In those pre-internet days, everything was paper-based. Most of us signed up at the nearest branch of the US Post Office.
I would like to claim that I was rip-roaringly gung-ho to kill commies (the default US enemy of choice in those days), but that would make me seem far more heroic than I actually was.
In those latter days of the Cold War, relations between the USSR and the West were thawing. A youthful reformer named Mikhail Gorbachev was in the Kremlin, and he seemed very eager to reach an accommodation with the West. Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Despite Reagan’s earlier remarks about the USSR being an “evil empire”, Reagan wanted peace, too.
Then, as now, the Middle East flared up from time to time. In April 1986, Reagan bombed Libya in retaliation for that country’s part in the bombing of a West German disco, in which two US service personnel were killed. This action went down in history as Operation El Dorado Canyon.
But no one expected a protracted conflict in the Middle East, some five years before the 1990-1 Persian Gulf War.
The Vietnam War, moreover, was still in recent memory (though I could not remember it). Anyone over the age of 35 could recall how divisive that war (and its accompanying draft) had been.
In August 1986, my odds of being drafted were about the same as my odds of going on a date with Heather Locklear.
That was then, and this is now. The Trump administration has just announced plans to automatically register 18 to 25 year old men for the draft, starting in December.
On one hand, this represents no substantial change of the law. To the best of my knowledge, today’s 18-year-old men are subject to the same Selective Service obligation that I complied with back in 1986.
What about the war in Iran? Disastrous and ill-advised at that conflict is turning out to be, I don’t foresee a long commitment there. This is not the USA of 1964 or 1990. There is no appetite for an extended ground conflict in the Middle East. Even President Trump seems to realize that he’s made a major blunder. At some point, we will either negotiate a settlement, or declare victory and go home.
The new policy is, rather, typical of the automating craze of the twenty-first century, one that requires us to opt out, while Big Brother (in either corporate or governmental form) constantly opts us in.
From an administrative standpoint, if there is going to be a Selective Service system at all, this new policy probably makes sense. We aren’t in 1986 anymore, and that old system was burdensome and inefficient.
I noted this even then. The government already had my name, age, address, and Social Security number. Why did they need me to proactively sign up for Selective Service, when it wasn’t optional, anyway?
