Your essay resonates harmonically, Charles. I say that as a modestly-educated, thoughtfully reflective individual in my 7th decade of life who has both the intelligent perceptivity and world-wide life-experience upon which to make such an affirmation. Let me explain, but first some necessary backstory:
As a student of Asian Civilisation and philosophy, back in my earliest undergrad days in the Peoples’ Republic of Berkeley, I quickly threw off the superstitious myths and fables associated with the Supreme Beings of my youthful institutional religions (Catholicism and Anglicanism) and immersed myself in the Classic Greek literature (and its more recent, modern iterations). You know, that ‘Evil White European’ gobbledegook, that is so out of favor these days?
Eventually, I found that, like our inimitable four-legged, Disneyesque pal, ‘EEYORE’, I found myself most comfortable with the observations and declamations of Arthur Schpoenhauer (an orientation that I maintain today) as well as the more down-to-earth commentaries of that acerbic social critic, H.L. Mencken.
As an optimistic pessimist, I have long since understood that the human species (I call ‘em ‘Humming Beans’) that Ma Nature evolved are a fatally flawed, inherently doomed contender for ‘highest evolved sentient life form’ on this planet. As such, the great Christian belief in essential human goodness is both silly and hopeless. The closest any school of organised Human thought has come to grasping this essential state of cosmic ludicrosity are the ancient Asian Masters whose dogma may summed up in the simple phrase, ‘All is nothingness.’
OK. That’s where I’ve been stuck for over 50 years and there I’ll remain until my foot spasmodically kicks the empty paint pail. However, over my 70+ years of life, I’ve grown increasingly tired of the endless repetitions of human failing, both microscopically and macroscopically and as America of today continues to devolve into the mad insanities and narcissistic delusions of extreme leftist progressivism (in ALL its manifestations), I’ve long since been aware that at some as yet unguessed-at point, I shall become so terminally fatigued with life (as we have come to live it in quality-of-life-depleted America) that I may voluntarily ‘opt-out’ (as the marketeering/advertising minions so cutely phrase it) of it.
I’ve felt this way most of my life, after the powerful rush of youthful enthusiasms and experiential voyages of personal discovery faded away and vanished. In fact, as a medical person in cardiac and pulmonary areas of technology, I even beat the Hemlock Society to the development of a perfect, painless euthanasia device (involving gas mixtures and a breathing reservoir). As a back-up, I kept a small lab cylinder of 100% CO in a drawer (but never used it, even when Betty-Jo Biolosky left me for a young law student at UCB, oh rueful day!).
Not that long ago, I fantasised that the ideal death would be either freezing to death in the so-called’ Death Zone’, somewhere in the Himalayas, or alternately plummeting straight down to the Earth in a disabled air airliner, such as Concorde (which I flew on several times). [I should hasten to say, no worries here, folks…I’d never personally precipitate whatever caused the ‘mid-air’ crisis in reference).] Shades of George R.R. Martin’s ‘Song of Ice and Fire’, eh?
Your citations and statistics are apt, Charles, and one could write a book about this tragic process of world-weariness you reference here (and in fact several have been, in past decades), but in my considered opinion one of the main reasons why older people feel so ineffably alienated, isolated and ‘unneeded’ in today’s America is that the ancient tribal wisdoms of the ‘elders’ have been devalued so completely by a new generations of impetuous, youthfully dazzled youngsters who (like every generation before them, stretching back to the dawn of recorded history). Once a person has hit 60, they may as well no longer exist in the eyes of the OACs of our youthful contingent.
Think of this eternal youthful aspiration in terms of a rocket that is sent up on a mission to escape Earth’s gravity, but is encumbered by an engine that isn’t quite powerful enough to break those bonds before reaching Brennschluss (‘burnout’). That, I think, sums it all up as every new generation repeats this same fateful exercise in futility, ad infinitum.
I’d wager that Human life is, if I were a betting person, so infinitely beyond our pitiful intellectual abilities to comprehend it that we will never fully grasp exactly what it is that keeps us trained fleas jumping through the hoops of existence until our planet is incinerated to an incalculable degree of crispness by a supernova sun. Meanwhile, given all this futility, Humanity persists with its laughably quaint ‘hopefulness’ in something bigger, grander, and more meaningful than all the sum of Human aspirations to date. Hope is, after all, the balm of the masses, just as religion is its preferred abusive substance!
While I am not in sympathy with Marx, Marcuse, or any of the other more recent sectarian contenders for Jesus’s traditional salvific role, we must ever remember that HOPE is humanity’s eternal bugaboo, an insubstantial artifice that is as empty and devoid of tangible corporeal reality as the universe of the ancient Zen Masters.
Want proof? Just remember Churchill’s famous observation, “The further behind we look, the farther ahead we can see.” QED. [For the benefit of our younger members of the colloquy, ‘Churchill’ was that World War 2 see-gar guy…]
