Almost Gone

  It's been a bit of a pause since the last post; but then again it's summer and so much calls to you to get out of the house, from the cacophony of crickets giving you their nighttime mating symphony to the wild flowers just starting to bloom in the hills, even as the flowers in our gardens and yards struggle to make it through the drought-like conditions.  A quick peek at the calendar and one might gasp that here July is well past the halfway point -- summer is almost gone.  At times we might all feel that way, that of many of our own things being almost gone, even to the point of our memories or physical abilities, or the lifestyles and cultures or perhaps the neighborhoods we knew as a child; all appear to be disappearing or have disappeared entirely.  What's going on we wonder (and I say this especially to us older folks), or as the tee shirt more bluntly asked: Inside Every Older Person is a Younger Person Wondering What the Hell Happened?  What actually brought some of this up for me was that in a galaxy far, far away (my freelance writing days) I had considered writing a piece on that subject, items that were once so popular in their day and seemingly so essential but were now "almost gone."  But I realized even then that it would be an exercise in futility, that change happens so quickly that such a piece would never fly and would become instantly dated; the shelf life of products is so short (LCD televisions or CDs, anyone?).  Talk to any elderly person and (depending on their age), their memories of how they lived and how life once was will probably seem antiquated and as unrelatable as a Victorian movie or a black & white television show filled with horses and perhaps coal-powered trains that billowed dusky clouds into the sky.  Such imagery is difficult to imagine, a world that seems eons ago and yet that that world might have been a very real world for them, just as heavy steel cars without airbags or even seat belts were for me.  My now-yellowed file on those things "almost gone" (and showing my age) began with the then release of a book by Consumers Union (their magazine branch publishes the magazine, Consumers Reports), one titled I'll Buy That.  The organization was turning 50 back then and was looking back at what they considered the 50 items that had changed our lives...and the list was rather surprising (the book came out in 1986 to give you a perspective, their criteria being that it had to be items that resulted in a major change to our lifestyles).  Here's a partial listing: frozen foods, the Pill (back then, that meant the birth control pill for women), smoke detectors, tampons, washers & dryers, running shoes, power mowers, refrigerators & freezers, personal computers, detergents, latex paint, credit cards, automatic transmissions, and air conditioning, among others.

    No big deal, you say, because those changes have been around for ever.  But ask your grandparents (or great grandparents born pre-WWII) and you might discover that such items were monumental changes.  As the book said: Without air conditioning we wouldn't have Las Vegas, or Miami, or Houston, or Los Angeles.  At least not in their modern metropolitan forms that, collectively, make up the Sunbelt, the fastest growing area of the United States.  Nor would we have jet air travel, manned space flight, submarines, or computers.  Just peek around your apartment or home and picture it minus a refrigerator or a washing machine, and outside you having to push around a manual lawn mower or use that toxic paint thinner to clean up your paint brushes and hands (latex paint cleans up with water but no such thing existed about 50 years ago; kerosene-like paint thinner is now banned in many parts of the world)).  For me, that Vietnam generation later, it was an era of printed newspapers, McDonald's buildings that actually had the "golden arches," leaded gas (we called it "ethyl," which was also a common name for a woman way back when, although I'm not sure if the correlation was first based on the refinery product or the explosive personality of the person bearing that name), postage stamps that you had to lick if you wanted them to stick (and sometimes that was iffy), free bones for the dogs from the butcher, one who also cut or ground your meat for you (to save on shipping, most meats in stores now come pre-cut and lack any large bones), lawn edgers with metal blades (string trimmers had yet to be invented), drive-in theatres (sneaking a bunch of us in, all crammed in the trunk of the car, was a typical high school prank...or course, boots of the cars were much larger then), aluminum-tray tv dinners resting atop a set of portable table trays, radios & tvs that were boxy and filled with tubes, black velvet paintings, lighthouses, and Playboy membership clubs (here's another daunting perspective -- even the daughter of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is 65).  Words like hooligan and whippersnapper were already fading into the sunset, us kids laughing at the antics of our "old folks" and all their ways and beliefs.  It'll all come full circle, they'd tell us, always does; and we'd tell them that there was no way that corduroy pants and flared bottoms would ever return, much less appliances that were painted avocado green, tangerine and other "hip" colors (the Apple MacIntosh would make its debut in 1984).  And last month, Jack O'Neill passed away.  Doesn't ring a bell?  Thanks to a friend of his who was a pharmacist, he was introduced to a brand new elastic compound, something called neoprene.  The wetsuit was born!  But...things change.

Graph by Center on Budget & Policy Priorities

    Here's one thing that's also changed, the shift of who holds stocks, or pensions, or even 401k's.  Talk to most anyone in their 30s or so and you may find a very different outlook of the future than the one people my age share.  Social Security, once an untouchable government "bank" that was to be used only for those entering retirement...pshaw, Congress soon over-rode that law and began diving into those funds with abandon; in less than 20 years, that fund will start hitting a shortfall.  Adios, amigos.  Pensions?  What are those?  How about 401(k)s?  Nearly a third of employers don't even offer one anymore; and of those that do, nearly half of the workers don't participate.  Of those earning less that $40,000 annually, fully half have zero savings in any sort of retirement plan.  And that booming stock market?  Check out this opening statement in a piece by Bloomberg Businessweek: U.S. stocks have more than tripled in value since 2009, but the bull market has left a lot of Americans behind.  In almost every age group, the share of families owning equities --either directly or through funds and retirement accounts-- declined from 2007 to 2016, according to the Federal Reserve's most recent Survey of Consumer Finances.  There's one prominent exception: households headed by someone 75 or older...It's the highest number since the Fed began its triennial report of Americans and their money in 1989...The wealth gap between the oldest and youngest Americans widened to the largest on record in 2016, with the typical household headed by someone 75 or older boasting a net worth more than 24 times that of one headed by a person under 35.  In a related article, efforts to now make permanent the tax cuts for individuals retiring is likely to fail in the Senate (the tax cuts for corporations are permanent)...another blow for the younger generation.  Did I mention some of the ages of those making these laws?  Nancy Pelosi (House democratic head), 78; Mitch McConnell (House republican head), 76; Donald Trump, 72; here's what the site Quorum had to add: 1/3 of Representatives over 60 represent districts with a median age of 35 or less.  There are 44 congressional districts in which the age of the Representative is more than double the median age of their constituents...More than half of the Senators up for reelection in 2018 will be over the age of 65...Looking ahead at the 2020 elections, 21 of the 33 Senators running for reelection will be 65 or older.  Many of today's current Senators are in their 80s.

   One could almost hear the same words uttered by my generation -- when will all these old fogeys be gone?  And then one blinks and, gulp, we are those old fogeys.  Sometimes I think of that, that even looking ahead I too am "almost gone."  Twenty years, maybe?  But who knows.  I don't plan on it (who does?) but even having made it this far is a blessing.  It always is, every single day.  But quite likely, once I am gone my life will be about as memorable as that avocado-green dishwasher.  As author Rich Cohen wrote in The Atlantic about Jann Wenner: A funny thing happens when a part of your life becomes official history.  No matter how good that history is, the writer can’t help getting a crucial aspect wrong.  All the facts might be correct, but the spirit is lost.  The effect is like a body without a soul.  Everything we read about the past is bound to be incomplete because, though we might know what unfolded, we can never really know how the experience felt.  The story that gets pieced together takes the place of the memory, then becomes the memory.

    So what's the end result?  From my viewpoint, did the world look hopeless when I was younger.  There were protests and wars and corruption and a slant to the overly wealthy; it appeared then that by the time I would reach retirement age (which seemed impossibly far away), there would be no such thing.  I'd basically be working forever.  Some of my friends in their 30s and 40s, despite working and making rather good money, feel much the same way now.  But would you have expected words of hope to come from someone who was once the richest person in the world?  When TIME interviewed Bill Gates, he had this to say: Reading the news today does not exactly leave you feeling optimistic.  Hurricanes in the Americas.  Horrific mass shootings.  Global tensions over nuclear arms, crisis in Myanmar, bloody civil wars in Syria and Yemen.  Your heart breaks for every person who is touched by these tragedies.  Even for those of us lucky enough not to be directly affected, it may feel like the world is falling apart.  But these events --as awful as they are-- have happened in the context of a bigger, positive trend.  On the whole, the world is getting better...So why does it feel like the world is in decline?  I think it is partly the nature of news coverage.  Bad news arrives as drama, while good news is incremental -- and not usually deemed newsworthy.  A video of a building on fire generates lots of views, but not many people would click on the headline “Fewer buildings burned down this year.”  It’s human nature to zero in on threats: evolution wired us to worry about the animals that want to eat us...There’s also a growing gap between the bad things that still happen and our tolerance of those things.  Over the centuries, violence has declined dramatically, as has our willingness to accept it.  But because the improvements don’t keep pace with our expectations, it can seem like things are getting worse...To some extent, it is good that bad news gets attention.  If you want to improve the world, you need something to be mad about.  But it has to be balanced by upsides.  When you see good things happening, you can channel your energy into driving even more progress.  

   In my older years, the feeling that there is more good than bad continues to grow in me.  It's as if we need the bad in order to see the good, or to realize what we have...or don't have.  Sometimes we just need to be made aware of what's out there, to leave our own comfort bubble and try to bring balance to others.  One can feel that our good times, our peace on earth is almost gone.  Or perhaps it's that the bad times and inequality in so many areas are the things almost gone.  Things change and will continue to change...but outside the flowers continue to bloom in the hills, and the crickets continue to make their nightly music.  Despite all that is happening and no matter what side of the fence you are standing on, it's nice to have some constants, to have things that are here for longer than we will exist.  Almost gone?...not in their vocabulary.