Tag: old politicians

“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.”

 

 

 

 

What is the Place of Longevity?

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life – longevity has its place.”– from Martin Luther King Jr.’s last speech

Lately, the place of longevity has been in politics.  Joseph Biden has just been elected to the presidency at age 77 (about which I am thrilled for reasons that have nothing to do with his age).  Up to this point, the oldest age at which any President had left office had been 77 (Ronald Reagan).  Over the years the median age of election to our highest office has been 55.

Joe is not the only one.  There will be a regular old folks home in the capitol.  Nancy Pelosi is 80 and Mitch McConnell is 78.  The three of them will probably hold power together over the next couple of years (barring an upset in the Georgia senate races).  What does it mean when old folks are in charge?  I am a great believer in the value of old age, but what exactly should be the place of longevity?

Most workers tend to retire in their 60’s if they can afford it.  The average age of retirement in the United States is 62, with 64% of the working population retiring between 55 and 64.  Retirement cannot be mandated (with some exceptions – the military for example). In 1978, mandatory retirement ages below 70 were made illegal; in 1986 Congress got rid of mandatory retirement ages altogether.

And I know what you’ll say: 70 is the new 60, 80 is the new 65.  Maybe.  We stay alive longer; medicine can fix our hearts, open our blood vessels, and replace our arthritic joints.  And in the old days (before the 19th century), it was deemed inappropriate to quit just because you got old.  In that era, age was not a legitimate excuse for retirement from the English House of Lords; men were not free from conscription until they were 61.  King Lear is a parable on the problems with retiring too early (or at all).  Dante condemned a Pope to Limbo because of what he called “The Great Refusal” – retiring from the papacy because of age.  Plato did not think anyone was even fit to rule until they were at least 50, and he gave no retirement age.

So, I’ve been thinking again about what it means to have the old folks in charge.  Over a decade ago, I was mulling this over as I wrote a novel (The Last Quartet) about a world where a flu (yes, indeed!) killed off everyone except the very old (who had gotten the first round of vaccinations) and the very young (babies who were born with some level of immunity).  I tried to imagine old folks raising children and building a new world from the ground up as the loss of almost all working people meant that technology and infrastructure fell apart.  (You can read a short story I wrote as an abstract for the book here.)  In my imagination, the old folks rose to the occasion; they had no choice.  And the young knew no other world, so they accepted the leadership of their extreme elders.  At least for a while.

But, back to Washington and the leadership there.   I do not have the energy that I used to have, and clearly our current leaders do not either.  More, they did not grow up in the same world as most of their constituents.  They may have wisdom (some of them surely do – others I’m not so sure), but wisdom is exercised through careful consideration and not the hectic pace of daily agendas and crises.  Aging gracefully is, in itself, a kind of wisdom.  I think of Jimmy Carter as a model of this. 

In Galenson’s wonderful book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses, the author divides the more capable among us as either conceptual geniuses who do there innovative work early (think physicists) or experimentalists, whose work is the product of the slow accretion of learning, experience and reflection.  The latter group does their better work in later years.  Where does politics fit into this model?  Or, one might ask, who in politics has any time for reflection and the slow accretion of learning?

In any case, we are about to witness the oldest leadership this country has ever seen at the same time that we are living in an age when change has never been faster.  You know by now that I think the old have much to offer to those around us, that old age can be a wonderful time of life.  But there are limits.  In the daily reminders or reflections of Buddhism, there is this: It is the nature of the body to decay and grow old.   We can deny it; we can push ourselves.  We can do well within the constraints of our age.  But it is a constraint – both to ourselves and our ability to relate to those around us.  And then there is the question of why we are seeing such longevity in our leaders; it could be they feel they have much to offer, but it could also be that power is sticky and difficult to shake off.  Or to want to shake off.  But elderly they are, and we will see.  I wrote my novel as a thought experiment; we are witnessing a real experiment.

In The Last Quartet, I was also thinking about the ability of the old to pass on wisdom, rather than knowledge.  You can read the prelude to that book here, but you need to come to your own conclusions.