Winter of my discontent

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.