We’re All Old Now

Today the world is forcing an untold population to feel old. What does that mean? It means the country around us dived into a dimension we weren’t prepared to understand. Being old isn’t a function of years. It’s a function of confusion and fear. Aging has always been scary because the physical betrayal of our bodies pushes us out of the protective environment in which we worked successfully for years. Since each of us is a unique work of art, generic answers to our physical problems often produce disappointing results. The expensive solutions that crowd public media are varied and, inevitably, wrong because they’re based on profit. Or maybe “wrong” is too harsh. They’re probably sort of right. Or not.

As our country chooses another war that has nothing to do with freedom or democracy or humanitarian aid, those of us who are older and—hopefully—wiser just sigh. We’ve been here before—more than once. But who wants to hear our weariness? Who wants to hear about the friends and family we lost? Our voices have become annoying background noise. Who wants to notice the emotional scars of PTSD festering behind lined faces? No wonder so many veterans wander homeless or become suicidal. It’s as if the powers simply don’t care what we the people pay for the gains they imagine. And when someone who was once powerful such as former President George Bush speaks against the aimless chest-beating of the current administration, daring to remember the “mission accomplished” that wasn’t, the new powers don’t heed him, either. As the saying goes, growing old is mandatory but growing up is optional. Growing up requires maturity and the exercise of intelligence.

What do we of the aging population have to fear? Many of the safeguards we depended on as we labored through our working lives have been decreased or removed. To paraphrase a catch phrase from the AIRPLANE film, we picked a heck-of-a-time to get old. The government tries to push different foes into the sights of American weapons and hate, using some of the same excuses we’ve heard before. But when budgets are cut to pay for the whims of government officials we didn’t choose, it’s our safety nets that tear. It’s our kitchen shelves that remind us our hard workers are being persecuted.

We finally have time to notice the climate crises. We planned to spend retirement time fishing—in shrinking lakes and streams already so polluted that the fish we catch must be eaten with caution. The trails where we planned to hike and picnic are littered and sometimes destroyed by careless “progress.” Water has become the dwindling resource that will start future wars when our people are the immigrants shrugged aside from other lands.

Few of us would’ve predicted that we would spend our final energies protesting–being called terrorists, but we will if we must. We don’t want to know that we’ve become easy to fool. We were repeatedly taught to obey. We trusted our news that was secretly propaganda. Native peoples we displaced are being accused of being immigrants. We trusted our institutions to educate us to be wise, our religious centers to teach us to be kind, our families to be there for us as our bodies fail. We were proud that we had chosen different paths than those followed by fascist countries. We were proud of our diverse scientists and their discoveries. We honored our accomplished women, defended our vulnerable citizens, protected our children, and cared for our fallen warriors—not perfectly but with an intention to become ever better. Now we see where we were too naïve. We’ll step up to this dark time, confident that love and integrity are more important than gawdy gold. Personally, we the aged are the ones who have nothing to lose… but the best of our humanity.