Axar.az presents an article ''Oops'' by John Samuel Tieman.

I'm 73, pushing 74. I spend a lot of time thinking about the past. Call it low self-esteem, call it the long view, but I'm struck by just how much I have gotten wrong during my seven decades. I used to think age would bring wisdom. Age has just made me narrowly adaptive so that my overall wrongness doesn't kill me. From these reflections have I made a list of twenty-something mistakes. There is no particular order to the items.

** I used to think it would be a good thing if our political parties became more ideological. The British, for example, have the Labour Party and the Conservatives. It never occurred to me that a large part of the Republican Party would evolve into an authoritarian cult of personality that espouses white nationalism.

** I've spent years saying, “Donald Trump can't possibly survive this.”

** When I returned home from Vietnam, I thought that surely we would see the folly of war.

** I knew marijuana would be legal across the United States by 1975.

** I would not, in a million years, guess that masks and vaccines would be contentious during a plague.

** I thought we'd have race relations worked out by now.

** I always thought that, if the Catholic Church ever has a sex scandal, it would be something about priests having sex with female parishioners, maybe nuns, in any case grown women. That 4% of priests would be accused of having sex with minors, still shocks me.

** I certainly never thought I'd live to see the current appalling rise in blatant Anti-Semitism.

** I have known for decades that climate change was coming. I thought the world would unite around stopping it by now.

** I had no idea that global warming would come so quickly and be so dramatic.

** I thought gas prices would be like $10+ per gallon by now.

** I thought that, by now, every house would have solar panels on the roof.

** When I was an undergraduate, I was profoundly influenced by feminism. I presumed the men of my generation were likewise so influenced.

** With Donald Trump out of office, I thought normal Republicans would reassert themselves.

** About that Pandora's Box that Trump opened, I vastly underestimated the staying power of open and blatant Anti-Semitism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, and racism in general.

** That Queen Elizabeth would outlive the Prince Of Wales, I was sure of it.

** I had not an inkling of the role that delusion would play in modern politics, particularly on the far right.

** I was utterly clueless about the power of platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

** I thought I would be wise by now.

** I thought the scourge of gun violence would be over like a hundred mass shootings ago.

** I thought that, by now, being LQBTQ+ would just be considered a trait, like being right-handed or having a Mexican accent.

** I never thought intimacy would figure so large in these, my later years. The intimacy I experience with my wife and my home, Missouri, who knew?

** As paradoxical as it may sound. I never imagined age would bring so much death. The loss of friends, and relatives, that's the greatest pain of old age.

** I didn't think I'd need a car by 2023. I thought there would be a metro station at every corner. That and weren't we all going to commute by helicopter by now?

** I thought that there would be a colony on the moon.

** Speaking of the moon, that I have more computing power in my cell phone than Apollo XIII had on its way to the moon – who could have guessed?

** Gender transition, gender fluidity, more than two genders – I know the issues, I'm sympathetic, but I won't profess profound understanding.

** A young woman walked by the other day. She had bright blue hair, a nostril ring, and a sleeve of tattoos. This old man thought two things. “How beautiful,” and “I just don't understand.” Sure didn't see that coming.