Sometimes it's hard even for me to remember, but I'm "old".
I'm over 60. I've left "late middle age" and entered the early stages of "elderly".
Mind you, I don't "feel old". I can see the age spots. I can see how my muscles have dwindled from the fullness of adulthood to that lean stringiness that seems to characterize age. I have all sort of aches, ohhellyes, and as of last week I'm bionic in both hips. Ugh. I'd forgotten how irking recovering from that surgery was.
But I don't feel like I've suddenly jumped two decades ahead from the sun-in-splendor of my forties. I don't feel ready to go down to the grave quite yet.
And yet, there it is. If I have twenty more good years I will be phenomenally lucky. I'm not dead yet, but my death - like a dragon on the roadside, to use Bill James' wonderful image - is increasingly visible. I won't make it into midcentury, and the bulk of my life is now part of history, and not future.
Not only am I now "old", I'm a very particular kind of old.
Born in 1957 I'm part of what I believe is called the "late Baby Boom" population cohort in U.S. society. I came of age - grew from late adolescence to early adulthood - between 1967 and 1977, so the way I look at the world around me is very much shaped by those years. Which were, as much as any period in American history, suffused with promise. The technologic and engineering promise that is perhaps best symbolized by the lunar landings of 1969. But also the social and political promise of the Civil Rights era, and the events of Vietnam and Watergate that led to what appeared at the time to be a great rejection of the ideas of an imperial America and a royal presidency.
It's fashionable now to mock the pretensions and naivete' of the Sixties and early Seventies counterculture. And, yes; that ideal and many of the people who embraced it were silly and naive and full of much of the poison that eventually killed the whole notion.
But for a time, and for me much of the time that I grew to a man's understanding of the world around me, my country seemed ready to live up to some of its noblest ideals. Freedom from want. Freedom of speech. Equal justice under law.
Yes. I know now those were largely illusion. I know now that even then they were flawed, and that many Americans hated them and fought them. But those were the times that made me. And that, perhaps as much or more than anything else, is what makes this time so bitter.
Because since 1980 I've watched my country reject those high ideals. In part simply because many of my "fellow citizens" would prefer immiseration to sharing prosperity and peace with "those people"; the dark, the queer, the poor. In part because many other of my fellow citizens would rather accept that the nation should fail "those people" rather than force a fight with the racists and oligarchs and theocrats. I've watched as malefactors of great wealth, people like like Rupert Murdoch, have worked diligently to turn my countrymen into aggrieved, angry, intolerant assholes. Worse; aggrieved, angry, intolerant assholes who insist that either the nation sway to their intolerance or that there be no nation at all.
Sure. I know that my country was founded by rich white guys and designed to be run by rich white guys for rich white guys. But it had seemed to me that this could and would be changed. That We the People would come to fully embrace the ideals of the documents we were taught to recite in school, y'know, "life, liberty...establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility..?" That stuff?
But that, instead, through my adult life, I've watched as the "conservative" people of my nation become meaner, smaller, more vicious, more angry and more vindictive and despite this obvious decline and fall take over more and more of the nation.
Despite being less than half of the country I've watched them steal two presidential elections and dominate the congress and the statehouses. Instead of arguing whether we should divest more of our empire sooner rather than later we now have a solid minority that insists on eternal war against phantasms like "radical Islamic terror" and "immigration". Instead of finding ways to reduce inequity and bring more Americans into comfortable prosperity we're fighting a rearguard action against legislation that shoves wealth upwards and further punishes the poor and disenfranchised. Instead of trying to decide which level of environmental health is healthy enough we watch as safeguards on poisons and pollutants are derided as "overregulation" and reduced or removed, as the people whose profits depend on the disregard of the public's health and welfare are placed in charge of "protecting" that health and welfare.
Instead of the promise of my youth, I find myself increasingly trying to defend the barest of minimums against the return of the predatory feudalism of the Gilded Age.If you wonder why I write so little here, it's because I have lost so much hope that anything I can say will do any good.
I don't intend to stop fighting these people. In the American Experiment to lose is to die, and though I'm old I'm not yet dead.
But it's brutally sickening to have to be fighting what I thought were battles won in my youth.
I never thought I'd see myself in twilight struggling over that same dark and bloody ground tens of years after the bright promise of my dawn seemed to sweep over it.
And yet, here I am, and here you are, too.
7 comments:
I hear you old man. Course I am a youngster, born in '58.
I am also more optimistic. The internet levels the information playing ground to a much greater extent than ever before. And yes, I acknowledge that the internet billionaire oligarchs are no friend of "we the people".
And so I foresee that the rich old men will have increasing difficulty maintaining their perch of power.
At least my kids (and their friends) see the danger and take an active interest in politics. So, it isn't over yet.
I want to hope. It's literally sickening - as in, the gut-tearing nausea you get when contemplating some awful thing - for me to have to re-fight these battles that should have been won and done decades ago.
But the thing that horrifies me is the degree to which the past two decades have exposed the real difficulty that the mechanisms the Framers put in place to prevent "mob rule" put in the path of anything not in the interests of the old, the wealthy, and the white. I mean...the Senate now over-represents that constituency to something like 150%. A relative handful of old white goobers in Montana and South Carolina hold the whip hand over the megacities like Los Angeles, Austin, New York City, and Chicago. The notion that Rhode Island has equal political weight as California?
How the hell do you justify that?
Unless, of course, you're some crusty old racist fuckstick who doesn't believe that the nigras and homos and wimmen and lib'ruls are really Real Americans.
The last time we had political and social divisions this deep it took a war and hundreds of thousands of lives to temporarily settle the issue. Which went so deep that we didn't really settle it, just kicked the can down the road a century.
It just seems like the table is so tilted that there's nothing short of another civil war will right it.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-how-capitalism-needs-reformed-parts-1-2-ray-dalio?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
Oddly, FDC, I was just coming over to offer an article on more or less the same topic you're writing about but in much greater depth with vastly less insight... I suspect the discussion about this might benefit from being on the Milpub instead of the more local US audience you tend to attract (sorry, but not a lot of other non-US citizens tend to wander here compared to the Milpub).
The key question that the US is wrestling with right now is roughly this: "We've gone through a LOT of different economic/societal models since 1620 or so (using those dates because the Virginia planters and the Pilgrims both had HUGE influence on what followed in both the econ and societal models that were used and how the econ and societal models had an impact on each other).
Furthermore, due to some astonishingly bad luck, I personally have dropped into one of the US's greatest and stupidest economic traps: I lost my job because of personal health issues that were not recognized until too late. With the job, I lost my medical insurance and my ability to work (employers are very concerned about what happened happening again to them). Without regular medical treatment, I can't work. Without work, I can't afford regular medical treatment, which prevents work and supports the vicious cycle concept of healthcare.
Don't cry for me America, I was lucky beforehand and built up some huge reserves (of money, people, connections, and good will) and will get through this, albeit a bit dinged up.
My next message will highlight something else happening in America that's MUCH worse for American society as a whole. In part because it hits so hard specifically at our weak spots as a society.
Well, I think that President Ocasio-Cortez will be interesting times.
She is a true celebrity . And Americans love celebrities. Furthermore, unless she fucks up badly, she is likely to be able to maintain her position because of her fame. This makes her much less vulnerable to institutional corruption because she doesn't *need* oligarch's cash.
A big change I see is that, slowly, people are more willing to kick in a sawbuck or two to support politicians that they favour. Politicians are very sensitive to the needs of their donor base, and if their base is lots of small donations, they will serve those donors.
Bernie demonstrated that this is a viable strategy.
I'd love to have hope that We the People can figure a way out of this.
Looking around...I'm not so sure.
No. Actually, I AM sure - that it will be damn deadly difficult to avoid a New Gilded Age and the Man on Horseback.
The political deck is really stacked. There's a crap-ton of veto points in the US system to accomplishing anything through legislation. A hell of a lot of those veto points are immensely vulnerable to cash. So the people who profit from the current system - the rich, the white, the male, the corporate, the grifters and banksters and looters - have a MUCH easier time making things NOT happen.
The ridiculous Trump nonsense is a distraction from the reality that the Republicans are jamming the federal bench with antediluvian Federalist Society choads who will gleefully slam down any attempt to stop their party's Back to the 1929 Future agenda. The Senate is deliberately anti-republican. The nation is solidly - 40% solidly - racist CHUD.
I hate to say this, but I think we're going to look back on the 1940-1980 period as the brief sunlit upland of U.S. political and economic equality. Because from where I sit, the future looks pretty damn dark.
Read this today and it sums up how I feel about the State of the Nation.
If there are 10 of you arguing about what to have for dinner, and 6 of you vote for pizza while 4 vote to kill and eat the other 6, while it's good that pizza won you still have a big problem on your hands.
The past 2 years and change have made it clear that 40% of the US public has become, effectively, Nazis. Nazis in the sense that they 1) believe themselves to be the Pinnacle of Creation, and yet 2) believe they are in deadly danger and under constant attack by various untermenschen (liberals, darkies, queers, uppity wimmen), and 3) are willing to resort to everything from chicanery to lethal force to protect #1 and destroy #2.
I mean...what is that, if not a Nazi? You got everything but the spiffy uniforms; ends justifying means, winner-take-all, enemies all around, the lugenpresse - Trump's "fake news" is an almost perfect cognate for the original Nazi term, "lying press" - constant hysterical panic and rage over imaginary slights and "emergencies" to justify vicious lawbreaking and rulebreaking.
But the media rules say you can't say that out loud. So you have the 21st Century Goebbels, Steven Miller, pulling strings at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue but no one is willing to call him that. You have Trump playing the caudillo - and if you think he's a nightmare now, wait until he gets re-elected; he'll take out after his enemies like the Wrath of God, rules and laws and customs be damned.
No, guys. I don't have a lot of hope that Bernie and AOC can rally America to defeat these Nazis. I think we've just run out of luck.
I am a few months older, but it took me until late in the Obama years to fully realize I'd swallowed the conservative codswallop and helped, by my votes and NRA membership, to push thru agendas I now realize were damning to this nation. I'm pulling the plug, more or less, on actual working thanks to my military pension and SS and hope to get involved in organizations where I can make amends.
You spoke from the heart and damn if I didn't feel the sting. I fucked up in the 1980s with my beliefs. I swallowed what Limbaugh said as tho it had any truth to it. I looked up at Reagan. As you said we're on the slide down. I'm well past my best used by date but damn if I'll not try to help right the ship and get it back on track. I've no grandkids yet but I really want them to have that world we imagined we'd have when we grew up in the 60's & 70's. No racial bias, equality, clean air and water, ready access to our public lands, quality affordable health care and education. An America that was not only great but helping the rest of the world, especially the parts beaten up and down trodden by their own corrupt leadership,to be great. The left isn't perfect and often shoots itself in both feet but over all I want them to win because the right may just as well shoot you and me in the head.
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