Young - Old - Young Again

I used to admire the elderly.  Oh in many ways I still do.  I value their insight and their perspective.  I marvel at the world they have known in their lives and how it has changed.  How they survived the hard times and prospered.  How some just survived. Politics however has given me a different perspective.  It is a much uglier perspective and not one easily spoken of.

The truly elderly are the most remarkable in my mind.  Those that have retained their minds in a late state of age.  My father recently regaled me with a tale of my grandmother's first political contribution.  She was shy to give, 10 dollars was all she could afford and she was afraid it would mean nothing.  A visiting campaign worker canvassing for a local city council candidate was present and my father interceded.  "Would ten dollars help?"  he asked.

"Oh yes!" she replied.  "It takes six dollars to buy a t-shirt." 

"Six dollars!" my 93 year old grandmother exclaimed as she reached into her wallet.  "Then I will give sixteen!"  My grandmother even voted 'yes' on the California initiative to legalize marijuana.  Perhaps as you age you reach a point where the mind  goes from contracting to expanding as the light at the end of the tunnel comes ever closer.

That said, something has happened to a large number of the pre-baby boomers and the early baby boomers as they advance into their 60's, 70's and 80's.  As a group they became the most self centered self focused individuals in the nation aside from the truly rich.  They gripe about all the benefits afforded to them that the rest of the society is absent.  Social Security is not enough, don't touch my Medicare.  Government stay out of my business!  And if the nation must have less for me to have more, so be it!   Never mind the blatant hypocrisy that the two programs they are most dependent on are both government programs.  I don't know if it is derived from a sense of entitlement coupled with age or if it comes out of fear of the unknown.  Fear of life's progression in the eyes of failing health.  Whatever the cause, they seem to forget the very society that they once rose in.  "Things were harder in my day!" they will proclaim.  Never mind the fact that they were the last generation to grow up with companies that provided benefits, security and retirement systems.  Today outside of a handful, the concept of a pension is dead.

With retirement comes time.  Time to watch TV and see the endless stream of commentary that tells you to be angry but you are really not sure what about.  It tells you to be afraid when you are not sure what to be afraid of.  Most importantly, it brings time to be part of the process.  The elderly vote.  Oh do they vote.  For that reason every argument is tailored to them.  Every political statement is made with one eye in the rear view mirror.  They live in the present, not in the future.  Why build a railroad they will never ride or fund a school they will never attend?  Years ago I worked for a state legislator in Alaska.  When we did programs designed for voter outreach they were not at the homeless shelter, unless it was for a propaganda photo, they were at the senior center. 

There should be no battle of the ages.  To have one is simply ridiculous.  The young should seek wisdom from the old and the old should care about the generations that they spawned.  We are all their children and to forget us is to forget a piece of themselves.  We must care for our father's, our mother's.  They built the world in which we live.  Social Security and Medicare were programs designed to avoid every seeing the elderly in poverty again.  At the same time they, the elderly, should feel equally ashamed to see a younger person living in poverty.

In the Old Testament, Leviticus 23:22 tells us "When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest.  Leave them for the poor and the alien.  I am the LORD your God."  

When will self interest give way to societal sacrifice?  Sadly, perhaps never.  Maybe this quality is just not  quality in line with the American self perception of independence and individuality.  Yet the very same quality of independence once encouraged neighbor to help neighbor.  Have we become so distant from our roots?

With age comes wisdom or at least a reference point for observation.  As our nation has marched forward during my life time I am saddened by a new reality.  It is a reality that has slowly engulfed us as a people in such a nefarious way that it prevents us from ever seeing the blanket that has descended upon us.  Inch by inch the cloak of corporatism has been pulled over our heads.  This is not to say we weren't seduced by its embrace.  The toys it brought us, the promises of a better life.  Yet the cost of our embrace was to sacrifice the qualities of democracy and government by the people our nation was founded upon.  In its stead, we have become nothing more than tools manipulated in a fashion that best serves the powers at be.  Like a cancer in a body that at first is unseen it gradually consumes the host.  Sometimes it is a fast process, sometimes it is barely noticeable.  All the same the cancer thrives upon it and eventually, we die as a people.

With our consent we have surrendered our governance to power and money.  We have handed over the keys to our democracy to corporations that have no interest in our health as a people.  We are simply a vehicle to make money and like a cancer, will eventually consume the host.  When that day comes, it will move on and find another body to feast upon.

Fascism is a word Americans flinch from.  It evokes images of Nazi's and power grabs.  Yet at its core fascism is nothing more than the merging of corporate and state interests.  While our 20th century examples of true fascism has perished, the companies that supported them most definitely still exist.    They have cleaned their images and written history to their liking yet they are there.  They exist in German companies like Siemens, and BASF.  In Bayer, Mercedes and the Italian Fiat.  In banks that sheltered money for whomever had the keys to the vaults.  In America they existed in our companies that collaborated like Prescott Bush and the Union Banking Corporation that was frozen in 1942 by the US Government for trading with the enemy.  In the industrial interests of William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Kennedy, Charles Lindbergh, John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon (Alcoa), DuPont. General Motors and Standard Oil now Exxon.  In Ford, ITT and General Electric.

These were the companies that pulled the corporate levers in 1939 yet our government was strong enough to resist.  Democracy prevailed yet it took the stigma of military machines and conquest to turn the tide.  America continued however, in our shadow, the same money continued to exist as it does today.  The difference is that as corporate power has once again intertwined itself with government and assumed the levers of power there is no enemy to resist its allure.  The industrial concerns of today exists in the hidden power brokers that determine what our image is as a people.  In the oil industries and coal industries.  In the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance brokers.  In the banks that drove us to the brink of disaster and then asked us for a bandage to arrest their hemorrhage.  It is power that has learned from the past and is no longer driven by marching armies, it is driven by the power of seduction.

As a people we have been seduced.  We have been reduced to a nation that thinks only as individuals.  Even the elderly that once acted as a bastion, a rampart of our democracy has thrown down their guard and accepted fear and self interest.

When that campaign worker visited my Grandmother still believed.  She believed that a person could make a difference.  That 16 dollars when given to a good person was the right thing to do.  I admire her and I wished I believed.  Yet as millions flood into candidate coffers buying the politicians that govern us my mind is turning away.  There are still good people but we all know marketing is everything.  When a candidate sits like a local can of soup on a shelf he might be the best tasting soup in the world, but what is a buyer to think when the look at rows and rows of Campbell's soup cans?  "Never heard of that one..." the buyer says as a Campbell's jingle plays in their mind.

I hope that someday America will look in the mirror and see what we have become yet like an alcoholic drinking or a drug addict they seldom see themselves until they hit bottom.  Oligarchy, government by a small group or class, is a word we should know by heart because it is emblazoned on our foreheads.  The problem is, if we never look in a mirror we will never know its there.