I'm an older man. What's wrong with us?
I used to wonder, when I was working at the Post-Star, what was afflicting older men that made them so miserable.
All of our most strident and embittered and difficult commenters, the ones constantly writing mean letters and website comments we wouldn’t publish and claiming they were being censored, were older men.
The person who wrote a nasty, profane and racist rant about me and my child on an online message board restricted to police officers?
The one who would cut out stories and mail them to me with handwritten notes about the decline of the United States because of the growing presence in our population of people who aren’t white?
The folks shouting that the paper was biased against conservatives because we refused to publish letters and comments filled with false statements and insults?
The person who, one day when I was out on my lawn, stopped his car to walk up my driveway and tell me I was wrong about something?
The prominent reader who pressured the publisher to fire our editor because he didn’t like an editorial?
All older men.
Now that I’m no longer in the newsroom, I interact less often with men who are a little shorter and lot angrier than they used to be. But a couple of weeks ago, I was parked with Bella and Ringo in an empty section of the Price Chopper parking lot, putting my wallet in my pocket before opening the door. A pickup truck swerved past, within a foot of my side of the car. If I had opened the door just then, it and, perhaps, I would have been smashed.
The truck had parked nearby, and when I got out, a short old man with short hair and white stubble on his face slid out of it and smirked at me as he walked toward the store. He didn’t appear to be drunk.
I noticed the Navy veteran bumper stickers on his pickup, and I thought of the bumper sticker on our car, dating back to 2016, which says, “Make America Great Again — Deport Trump.” Was that why he had risked damaging our cars and perhaps my body?
I’m 62, and I’ve been retired for a year and a half. It feels much longer. I enjoyed excellent health for decades, but I’ve had four surgeries in the past three years and spent about five months, starting last October, in near-constant pain. I’m the caregiver for my wife, who has Alzheimer’s, diagnosed six and a half years ago and gathering force now.
These are life circumstances familiar to people my age, and I sympathize with other older men struggling with grief and pain and loss of purpose.
Bella has not been eating for weeks, and when I spell out for her what this means for her health, she falls silent then asks me plaintively, “What do I do?”
The question echoes for me. What do I do with my sadness and boredom and frustration? How do I continue to appreciate life?
I don’t have an answer. I try.
It is so very hard to grow old in this country. Support is often difficult to find, our bodies fail us and our peers often feel free to say whatever they they think, letting their true feelings show. I feel sorry for those who are angry, bitter, prejudiced and feel that they need to be right. Hang in there, we all aren’t like that.
Okay, I’m going to talk politics here…get ready, or stop reading.
I believe the hate and anger we see so much especially in older white men is not an accident, and worse we are seeing more of it all the time among young white men and women. It’s being purposely cultivated by wealthy and powerful interests who feel they are not powerful enough and want it all. The tactic is simple and time honored: divide and conquer. The tacticians are people who are on the John Birch Society spectrum who were soundly rejected by the very healthy civil rights movement. When Nixon was driven from office “libertarian” fascists went on a campaign of funding far-right think tanks and organization, some are well known like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, others are more anonymous. These groups are funded by people like the Koch brothers, Harlan Crow, the DeVos family, the Mercers … and they’ve worked systematically to disable and disarm the rules and regulations that strengthen civil society. Not too long ago the government limited the number of news outlets a single owner could hold in any market, limited corporate money in politics, supported public education, supported the rights of women and minorities. All of this and much more was accomplished by the Party of No.
It’s an appropriate name, Party of No. our nation was founded on a very simple principle “governments are instituted among (the people) deriving their just powers from consent of the governed.” Government must be just, and justice is derived through consent - an admonition that finding a way to say yes to those we disagree with is the very core of our experiment. But not just any old way of finding a way to say yes, giving consent, finding consensus, cooperating. Compromise is not the goal, consensus is. Compromise was a fall back position the Founders used on issues they could not find consensus in order to avoid the division King George sought to sow among them, but compromise was not great. Everyone walks away from compromise feeling they have lost a bit of their deepest principles and so the major compromises of the Constition left fissures in society that the Civil War did not resolve. Those fissures persist and those who seek to gain power are using those same fissures to split us apart.
It is a bleak analysis, but not one without hope. Arguments for compromise with those who gain power by a strategy of “no” on every issue only makes our democracy weaker. It makes each of us weaker individually, philosophically.
The strategy to heal division is to find common ground, to cooperate where we may, to find consensus with others, even those who we may despise. That requires empathy of a kind that is difficult to muster, but columns such as this one help us to find empathy.
Thanks Will.