Shunning Ageism, Embracing Old Age

This week, if I remain lucky, I will celebrate my 85th birthday. I find myself now belonging to a cohort that makes up 5% of the population and is comprised of people considered to be the “oldest of the old.” This new and precarious status has caused me to do something I’ve never done before in the 54 years of writing this column —mention myself in the lede.

I do so this morning with some trepidation and distaste, and a tangled mixture of obvious reasons. Like the large majority of Americans, I’ve had to accept that our country is in a uniquely perilous mess. Our basic civil rights of free speech, lawful assembly, religious liberty and equal justice under law are being routinely disrespected, ignored or twisted beyond recognition by those in power who must actually believe they are above the law. The impact of this mess on the health and well-being of New Mexicans is a potential calamity, especially for those who rely on food stamps and other public assistance to keep alive.  

With armed deportation raids sweeping people up off the streets and kidnapping kids and families in schools and churches, Republicans have made racism directed toward people of color a national policy.

By waging a war on Medicaid, not only has the Republican power structure come close to criminalizing poverty, non-white ethnicity and the misfortunes of disablement, their actions reveal a virulent form of ageism. The growing distrust, suspicion and even hatred of the old is seen most obviously in the caustic accusations of senility, and even dementia, directed at elder politicians whose personalities and policies their opponents do not like. No one is spared.

When you add the Trump administration’s unconscionable reversals in climate change remediation, it’s hard not to take the disasters of the present moment very personally indeed. And then there’s the anguish of being forced to ask the eternal question over and over again, what’s to be done? Is a column like mine even useful anymore? Am I just joining the deafening choir of shrieks and moans?

I’ve had to ask myself if age has given me a legitimately broader and perhaps sharper level of insight than I’ve had in the past. I’ve felt a strange relief when I’ve had to reply, no, not really. I pretty much hold the same opinions I’ve always held, though I’d like to think they might be a shade more refined. Still, these times are a mangle of deep confusions and malicious obfuscations that leave younger people demoralized and old timers feeling up a creek trying to explain them.

So what does one say when the present moment in American history is a hair-raising catastrophe that has cruelly tormented and politically neutered large numbers of one’s fellow citizens, old and young, who are ducking for cover to preserve their mental health? Is there anything to be said at all? Are you ducking for cover too?

It’s arch hypocrisy to counsel calm and call upon an ersatz sense of hindsight against which the present predicament pales. All times have had their horrors, it’s true. But this is ours. And comparisons are odious. There’s no point, either, in trying to macho it out. Bluster and braggadocio are not the roads to mental health.

Democrats whimpering dire warnings and begging for money as an electoral strategy is infuriatingly unhelpful too. What do they plan to do? Do they have a plan at all? Major news outlets reporting on massive government cuts across a spectrum of federal agencies without doing the back-up reporting to explain what services have actually been diminished is just bad journalism, despite Trump’s secrecy and data lockdown. For the mainstream media to be intimidated and adrift like that is a formula for even greater disempowerment and despair.

As I worked to gather my thoughts for this week’s column I became convinced that even though the chaos of PR-induced panic and alarmism of the moment is insufferable and suffocating, to preserve one’s sanity does not require complete withdrawal or retreat, or finding a fairytale and hiding yourself in a magic forest of false optimism or pessimistic certainty.

For what it’s worth, I’ve found comfort in what comes close to a secular faith in three unassailable realities — the inevitability of change, the fatal foolhardiness of creating implacable enemies and the indispensable virtue of making an honest and intelligent effort, no matter how small, in support of your own values and convictions.  

All circumstances always change. All prediction is dubious. Yet we know that somehow, sometime, the present situation will collapse and something new, and quite possibly more to our liking, will take its place.  What about the damage done in the interim? We wouldn’t have to have faith in change if we could do anything meaningful to lessen harm now. It’s fruitless to imagine, though, that harm itself isn’t subject to correction and healing, even if we know it will be impossible to return to the way things were before they were sabotaged. Making honest efforts to direct change in a more humanitarian direction defuses disempowerment, especially if you are not so ego ridden as to demand a specific kind of success.

Implacable ideologies that are self-righteously driven to achieve specific results at whatever cost to those who stand in the way tend to make implacable enemies who work tirelessly for their utter defeat. It’s unclear right now if Trumpian puritanical conservatism in America has stimulated an opposition so indignant and radicalized as to be electorally effective enough to activate the principles of political physics in an “equal and opposite reaction” in the near future.

What troubles many disaffected Americans is that they cannot tell if the political party that purports to represent them is, in fact, expending the kind of savvy effort that’s needed to take advantage of the political blunders and moral mistakes being made by its opposition. The tide will turn. We just don’t know if we’ll be ready for it.

I’ve also come to reconfirm for myself that politics in America has normally been a struggle between two views of human nature — the “conservative” one that believes humans are inherently flawed and doomed to evil and the “liberal” one that believes humans are fundamentally good and always capable of changing for the better if given half a chance. It’s the difference between “impoverishing austerity for your own good” and a magnanimous social safety net for all.

If there is comfort to be found, it is in a recognition that policies reflecting kindness, generosity and goodwill have tended to prevail in our country over the last century or so, and chances are they can do so again. Historically, good slices of working class conservative America have stopped advocating against their own best interests and joined the opposition. If they hadn’t tipped the scales and come to support economic, environmental and social justice from time to time, there wouldn’t be an America today still worth fighting for.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it