[Sidney Lanier]

Talk about creating an agenda and then researching only those things that fit it while ignoring everything else! Teachers, sociologists, psychologists, planners--those who are honest, anyway--can have a field day with this kind of one-sided presentation that I might go so far as to call 'bigoted.' No, I haven't read the book either, and likely wouldn't waste my time, but his fixation with 'gated community' in this article, which is not even accurate but fits 'the agenda,' makes clear his purpose in writing.

We ourselves are snowbirds. When asked about missing our grandchildren, our response is that we can visit them, and they us, easily--until they reach the age where visits with grandparents become appropriately onerous as they develop their own social lives, as inevitably happens. But what brings us back up north are friendships and our involvements in the organizations integral to our lives that we volunteer with, a view that no doubt would warm the cockles of the heart of Blechman. However, his assumption that we--and his former neighbors 'Betsy & Dave'--would not continue to be who they are and get involved in and around TV in exactly the same way that they had done in their previous community is a leap of confusion about human nature at best and disingenuous to fit 'the agenda' at worst.

To Blechman, for 'Betsy & Dave' to move across the Atlantic to England and the Cotswolds (a delightful area, to be sure) is acceptable whereas a retirement community is not? What incredible presumptuousness!!! Clearly he has rejected outright any "humor and humanity" mentioned as being present in the Rothman book, perhaps because these qualities do not exist in his own life. Sad....