Tag: heilbrun

“When Will They (We) Ever Learn?”

In these dark days, when the moral compass of this country has gone amok, I keep remembering the words of a hero of my hippy days.  “When will they ever learn?” was the chorus of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” a song recorded by everyone from Joan Baez to Dolly Parton, with the most iconic version being that of Peter, Paul and Mary.

And now my generation is in charge (although some of them should have long since segued into assisted living) and, clearly, we have never learned.  We were angry in the 1960s, but we were also hopeful.  I am no longer hopeful.  It is our generation that comprises Fox News’ largest audience segment, with the median viewing age being in their late 60s.  An impressive majority of those over 65 voted for Trump.  When will we ever learn?  And here we go – blundering into Iran, killing people and bulldozing flowers, while the entire world holds its breath and hopes there are not radioactive repercussions in addition to the disastrous economic impacts.

Seeger’s question can be looked at in two ways.  We could refer to each individual one of us.  We have all had the experience of watching someone in our lives make the same mistake (the friend who marries the same kind of man) over and over again. We do it ourselves.  We say, after the fact, that we should have known better – and yet.

But the we is also collective.  Our country has made the same mistakes over and over again.  Viet Nam apparently didn’t teach us anything; nor did the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Despite extensive postmortems after these initiatives… we do it again.  Off we march with optimistic hopes to spread democracy and make the world safer for mankind.  But there is no democracy and the world is less and less safe.  And we kill our own as well as theirs – the difference is that they kill our soldiers, while we kill men, women, children – whoever is in our way.  And now we are saying that even the most rudimentary (and humane) rules of war do not apply to us.

S. Eliot wrote a wonderful play about the death of Thomas Becket called Death in the Cathedral. In a key moment, as his death approaches, we get these lines from Beckett:

We do not know very much of the future

Except that from generation to generation

The same things happen again and again.

Men learn little from others’ experience.

But in the life of one man, never

The same time returns.  Sever

The cord, shed the scale.  Only

The fool, fixed in his folly, may think

He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

“Men learn little from others’ experience.”  A depressingly true statement.

And then there are the last lines, which seem to sum up the whole problem: “The fool, fixed in his folly, may think he can turn the wheels on which he turns.”  It seems to me that we have become more and more foolish.  Washington thinks it can fix our problems by killing people.  Silicon Valley thinks they can overcome aging and death.  And here we sit as children are bombed, people die for lack of health insurance, and innocent children go to detention camps.

One more example.  Scientists have had a pretty good idea that global warming was happening and what was causing it since at least 1938 when Guy Callendar assembled statistics going back into the 19th century.  And even if we didn’t believe in global warming, we knew that the availability of oil and gas was a disruptive factor, particularly when the gas shortages of the 1970s (1973 kicked off by an Arab embargo after the Yom Kippur war, and 1979 set off by the Iranian Revolution) Our generation sat in line for enough fuel to at least get us to work. (We were hippies no longer.)  There was much talk about alternative energy sources at that point – over 40 years ago!  Clearly no lessons were learned.  And the planet, indeed, has suffered.  Where have all the flowers gone?

Our generation did learn some things.  We stopped smoking, we learned to use a PC (and a cell phone, a tablet, and a smart TV).  We learned how to support ourselves (more or less), and we learned to exercise – and we learned that a little discipline is not always a bad thing.  But we didn’t learn how to stop wars, greed, and amoral leadership.

In her book about aging (The Last Gift of Time), Carolyn Heilbrun suggests that the young can learn little from the old, but the old can learn from the young.  I am not ready to learn from Generation Z, but maybe we could all profit from learning from our younger selves.  We thought we could change things.  Perhaps we need to tap into our long-gone hippie selves and see what is left of a generation that genuinely thought that the answer to “when will we ever learn?” was “when our generation is in charge.”  Oh, the pity!  And surely our generation is in charge.  Old people rule our country, elders who have not gotten wise like the ancient Yoda, but only wrinkled and bald like him.  (Of course, Yoda had 900 years to learn what he knew, a luxury of time neither we nor our planet has.)

As Eliot has the chorus say at the end of Murder in the Cathedral, “Lord, have mercy on us.”

 

 

 

 

Thoughts on the New Year and Turning 70

There is much hope in the land for the New Year; 2020 will not be fondly remembered by most people. I do not have to detail the collective tragedy of this lost year.  On the positive and personal side, we were blessed with two healthy new grandsons this year, but have only seen them once. And, just as the vaccine is in our sights, Covid has surged.  It has even entered my immediate neighborhood for the first time.

I have written in another year about the images of the “old” year (Father Time) and the “Baby” New Year.  This is a holiday which will not let us forget time is passing.  As I get older, New Year’s Eves come faster and faster, and I go to bed earlier and earlier.  No bells at midnight for me.  And I am cognizant today that 2021 is the year in which I will turn 70.  Seventy seems old to me.  I am sure I will get used to my new decade (although my husband who is two years ahead of me says he hasn’t).  But the numerical marker is a bellwether, a harbinger of things to come.

The Bible tells us that seventy years is all we can expect of life.  Psalm 90 is quite explicit on this point:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Or in a more modern translation:

Seventy years is all we have—eighty years, if we are strong; yet all they bring us is trouble and sorrow; life is soon over, and we are gone.

One can argue that in Biblical times 70 was much older than it is now.  Maybe.  But I know there are many things about old age that have not changed, that cannot be easily “cured,”  including the simple truth of the wear and tear our bodies and minds have undergone for seven decades.

As anyone who has been reading these blogs will know, there has been much debate in recent years on what our attitude toward old age should be.  One of my favorite authors (both as the academic Carolyn Heilbrun and the mystery writer Amanda Cross) wrote The Last Gift of Time – Life Beyond 60.  It is a lovely book about getting older and delineates many of the joys of old age.  Yet, Dr. Heilbrun also vows in the book to commit suicide at age 70,  as “there is no joy in life past that point, only to experience the miserable endgame.”  She actually waited until she turned 77; I wish she had waited longer.

A few years back (2014), Ezekiel Emanuel (noted oncologist and bioethicist who was recently appointed to Biden’s Covid team and whose brothers are Rahm and Ari) wrote a much-discussed article in The Atlantic entitled “Why I Hope to Die at 75.”  The title is misleading; Emanuel does not necessarily hope to die in his mid-seventies.  But he has decided that by age 75 he will give up all measures to make him live into a very long but perhaps debilitated old age.  He is clearly against euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, but:

I am talking about how long I want to live and the kind and amount of health care I will consent to after 75.  Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible.  This has become so pervasive that it now defines a cultural type: what I call the American immortal.

I recommend the article – particularly those parts about where our health care dollars are going and how statistics show that longevity improvements often just “increase the years spent in disability.”  By the way, Dr. Emanuel says in this essay that he will no longer take flu vaccines after age 75; I wonder how he feels about this in the current situation.  I do not want to make his argument simplistic though; it is a powerful statement of reality in the face of the very unreal chase after immortality.  As I approach my eighth decade, all these things are on my mind.

This is my last post in a remarkable year.  It is also the time for printing up my journal for the month of December and completing the three-ring binder labeled 2020.   This is the 17th year I have undertaken this process of recording my life in an organized way; these piles of words remember more than I do.    Virginia Woolf said, once, that she wrote her diary for her 50-year-old self to read (she was in her thirties when she said this).  Why does a 70-year-old keep a diary? (I bet you know the answer to this – if not read my blog on the subject here.)   And when is it time to stop writing and just to review and reflect?

December 31st  is also time to put away my books of morning readings – this year it was readings from C.S. Lewis and the third volume of a set of daily poems that I cycle through on a triennial basis. It is a time to start clearing away Christmas decorations and throwing out old calendars. 

And, as we clear away the old, are we getting ready for that final clearing away?  Does the end of a year make us consider that – perhaps – the new year might be our last?  Out with the old, in with the new?  Old man time being replaced by baby new year?  The old year being shuffled into drawers, shut into binders,  or collected in folders for our tax returns?  I have made no resolutions for the New Year.  I am not as pessimistic as Carolyn Heilbrun or Ezekiel Emanuel, but I did watch my mother’s life disintegrate into a malicious form of dementia in the end.  There should be some middle ground to this business of fading out, of becoming someone we don’t recognize mentally or physically.  I have no answers, but am open to alternatives.  And, in truth, I look forward to this new year.  Especially, to this new year.