09-30-2021, 11:45 AM
(09-30-2021, 10:38 AM)David Horn Wrote:(09-30-2021, 10:22 AM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: Within a few years the youngest Boomer cohorts-the late '50s cohorts-will reach their 65th birthday. Soon all the Prophets will be in old age, and we will soon see the oldest Boomers start die off.
We're already leaving the scene. I'm surprised by how many of my HS classmates are already gone. As '47 cohort I'm near the front of the line, but I feel pretty healthy overall. Many others my age, not so much.
Bad habits (drugs, smoking, alcoholism, fornicating) aren't good for an extended old age. Such risk-taking as bad driving isn't so great. Let's not forget poverty, which usually destroys any joie de vivre necessary for the motivation to stick around despite advanced age. Old age isn't too bad for those who have the means before their bodies give out. For the poor, old age is often a nightmare of fear, loneliness, and a lack of meaning. Then there are things for which nobody is at obvious fault, like diabetes and early-onset cancer, Parkinsonism, and dementia.
The fastest disappearance of Boomers is most likely in the poorest parts of America: obviously the urban ghettos, but also the economically-ravaged Mountain and Deep South, and that could result in rapid changes in political life. The Millennial Generation is much less likely to believe in Protestant fundamentalism even there, and that could easily result in the demise of the Religious Right/Tea Party/Trump cult (it's hard to distinguish them) as means of achieving and holding power for the Right. (It pretends to be populist with its appeals to visceral concerns of abortion, homosexuality, and racism and is ineffective in stopping abortion, homosexuality, and miscegenation but is highly effective in serving reactionary economics. I'm not saying that I want to see economic leftism tied to reactionary social values and a rejection of reason. I ask white people in the Mountain and Deep South what big tax cuts for corporate interests that don't live in their area and the evisceration of labor rights do for them.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.