No. I can take anyone seriously who wants to be taken seriously, and that includes people who are under three feet tall.
When I was about 12, my 5-year-old brother made a private remark to me after we had just survived some extended polite conversation with my mother’s important out-of-town visitors. He said: “They don’t talk to us like we’re real people.” I answered that I would never forget that. That promise has stayed by me all my life.
I will talk to anyone with respect, and I will listen: a child, a nonogenerian, a panhandler, a store clerk, a lawyer, a teacher, an inmate, an adolescent, a drunk. (Well, the drunk is a little hard.) I don’t dismiss anyone unless they are arrogant, rude and snarky, as some folks are around here, or display a lack of mental capacity for a civil exchange between equals. Wrinkles are irrelevant.
Every single person I meet knows something I don’t know, and I listen, hoping to glimpse what it is. Often I learn something new, even in a two-minute exchange with a drugstore cashier.