Reflections on current angst of septaginarians

 Unhinged, floundering, afloat, adrift, even frightened….these are just some of the words we are hearing almost daily, from those in the autumn of their lives. There is a sense that issues that threaten not only our ‘way of life’ as in our democracy, our social safety net, our national security, our global trading system, even the way we conduct our public discourse, and certainly the manner in which we are pillaging the planet, as well as the oscillating pattern of a pandemic that has already killed more than 4.5 million have swept over our consciousness like the tropical storms of the Atlantic and the fires in the western forests.

Nothing is holding our little ship of state, whether it be a national state, or our business state, or a faith community state, or a military ship or scientific ship ‘of state’. It is as if ‘statis’ has been flooded into the detritus of the storm along with shame, and compromise, and collaboration and meditation and even balanced arbitration. A few people have grown excessively wealthy, in the pure sense of money, stocks, stock options, bitcoin cryptocurrency. And some of their money has gushed into the political campaigns of a few highly opportunistic, ruthlessly ‘focussed’ and ambitious individuals, families, political ideologues and charlatans.

We no longer have a ‘set of agreed-upon facts’ upon which to conduct our debates and discussions, in an ethos where there are only two options, winning and losing. Binary has drowned ambiguity. Nuanced has succumbed to the onslaught of this overweening and richly funded cabal as if the medieval gladiator individual combat has exploded into our primary method of conducting ourselves.

People who have spent their lives in study and research, in the spread of contagious diseases are now attempting to have their voices heard, respected and honoured in competition with podcasts that trumpet the use of ivermectin as a therapeutic for COVID-19. Elections that were monitored, transparently audited and announced are now the subject of phoney, subversive, highly manipulated and fraudulent re-audits. No longer is a mere military combat the tail wagging the dog, the whole system has reverted to the tail on the dog, while the animal itself lies gasping for life on a ventilator.

The right to choose a vaccine and the right to refuse to mask as symbols of personal freedom is demonstrably killing hundreds daily. Personal freedom, as a cry is drowning out the access to clean air, free of a killer and rapidly mutating virus whose original release, like the Kennedy assassination, will remain a vaulted mystery, long after the next pandemic has killed its millions.

Carbon emissions too, the product of a human-engineered manufacturing, chemical, capitalistic and avaricious business system is choking our capacity to breathe literally, as well as metaphorically. And we blindly debate the literal while the metaphorical continues to have us by the throat. We are not subject only to a raging virus against which many of us have been vaccinated; we are subjected to an even more lethal, perilous and seemingly intractable and untreatable malaise of an atrophy, entropy or perhaps even mortally wounded ‘social’ instinct to work together.

We blame digital technology, or we blame the veering of our academic institutions from liberal arts colleges into trade schools, or we blame the myopic, naval-gazing of our descent into the literal reading, writing and ‘protection of laws, as if they clocked us from our worst tendencies. We think we have found the devil in the details when we expose hundreds of dead bodies near residential schools. We write and read and then forget headlines that expose hundreds, if not thousands, of dead and missing or murdered women mostly of minority populations. We believe that the state must seek vengeance, revenge, euphemistically termed justice, through the deployment of another system that is unprepared, unschooled, and disproportionately numbered in anal specificity and quotas.

We have descended down a rabbit hole of narcissistic micromanagement in a deluded belief that by that process and culture we are gaining even more control of our individual world. Transactional relationships that worship the shortest distance from A to B, in all of our interactions, based on a self-first need to justify both the time and the energy we ‘contribute’ to whatever enterprise, whether for wages or for the far less concrete benefits of volunteering.

We have turned ourselves into the kind of robotic, sterile, reactive and frightened shadows of our full selves in a headlong slide into not only Orwellian newspeak where hot button words mean precisely their opposite. We have surpassed even
Orwell’s worst dystopia, where nothing matters except which guru you choose to follow.

Rock stars and the millions of aspiring wannabees, religious evangelists, haloed billionaires, professional athletic superstars, female revolutionaries shattering the ‘glass ceiling’ or podcasters or governors determined to mount the papier mache mountain of perceived power and success are not the role models we need. Nor are they even role models worthy of the kind of genuflection we so blindly and appeasingly offer. It is not that the pursuit of the excellence of developing individual skills and talents needs disparaging. It is that the body politic, ordinary people, are not merely the hungry mob who can be easily and willingly seduced by that old Roman adage, “bread and circuses”. We are not merely pawns in another’s power game; we are not merely consumers driven both by an obsessive need to look perfect and to appear to be successful; we are not merely gluttonous and starving appetites for leaders who lie, who cheat and who manipulate their available levers of power and influence for their own advantage.

And yet, we have defaulted into those worst examples of self-inflicted victimhood that have been the hunted and the conquered and the decimated and the dispossessed and the starving and the irrelevant for centuries. Oh, there may be a kind of hierarchy of dispossession, based on matters of ethnicity, religion, education, gender or portfolio. Yet, at its core, the balance of power is no longer even perceptible to those clinging for life, literally. Millions of starving children, mothers and fathers, with their numbers growing exponentially hourly, are homeless, stateless, food and care less, and most depressingly, hopeless.

And the rest of us yawn and utter some bromide like “it was always like this” or worse “let them eat cake” as if there were even a morsel of cake in their reach. And we do not have to stretch our consciousness into the third world to see the disparities, the dispossessing, the desperation and the hopelessness. It is walking up and down the streets of our towns and villages; it is crashing the emergency room doors of our hospitals; it is tethered to the towing rigs on our highways; it is hiding underneath our bridges, behind our bandshells and our gazebos, in the alleys between our highrises; it is staring us in the face, while we worship in our oak pews and our Sunday finest; it is knocking at the doors of our consciousness in ways that exceed the desperation of the depression of 1929.

Today, this dislocation, desperation, dispossession and hopelessness has become a global phenomenon that embraces all skin colours, all ethnicities, all religions, all linguistic and tribal traditions and all ages. And perhaps it is the overwhelming scope of the plight, combined with the obvious cultural norm of ‘dithering’ and dabbling and placating our individual and collective pain in our own preferred ways that leads to the spectre that nothing can or will be resolved in the spirit and for the need of all of us.

There is no longer an “all of us”; there is only “me and mine” “here and now” and no thought or care for the ‘other’ and the ‘then’ and ‘there’. Our vision has not only been narrowed into a pin-hole, as if we look at the world through the keyhole of our own front door; our vision has turned inward so that we are exclusively looking inward through our own keyhole, in a bunker mentality evocative of those war-bunkers in the first world war. Only our bunkers have washrooms, kitchens, air conditioning, running water, flowing gas and instant-on electricity and a surfeit of entertainment to mollify us into semiconsciousness or for many oblivion.

The old Roman bread and circuses now reaches into every television and computer screen around the world, opening up “markets” for every shill-artist and cult-obsessed narcissist. And every one of those ‘marketers’ (because all human interactions have become mere business transactions) dubbed the new generation of entrepreneurs, has something to sell, something to convince buyers that his/her method is the only method worthy of consideration.

And not only has sales and marketing become the cultural language, but the method of doing both has replaced the quality and value of the “thing” for sale. It really doesn’t matter what enterprise one is engaged in, the enterprise has become a crude imitation of a business enterprise. And those who are and have been business magnets in their lives now are in the ascendent class while those who have spent their lives in a different mind-set, modality and culture have joined the dispossessed.

Hospitals, even in countries like Canada where universal health care is the basis of the care model, hospitals are now cutting corners to shave dollars, to become more efficient, to eliminate waste and to reduce the care-giving process to the least costly and the least cumbersome and the least time-wasting process possible. The business model, based on the most simple, most efficient, most impersonal and most “effective” transaction limits the time doctors have to spend with their patients because their fees are based on numbers of patients seen, not on the outcome of their consults. Digital answers for illness, disease, legal processes, forms and enterprises that rely on these platforms for their profits abound. And while some access seems appropriate, the basic model provides a hygenic and clinical distance between client and service.

Phones and zoom visits are now the norm, and while those pathways permitted some care during a pandemic, many in positions of power have and will continue to use the argument that those pathways are more efficient and therefore less costly and make them permanent long after this pandemic dissipates, if it does.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak with a classmate from university who was  overflowing with stories of men and women we both knew in the early 1960’s. We glimpsed lives long forgotten, yet still very impactful simply because we had a face and a voice, and a series of memories, however distorted, that we could listen to, reflect upon and consider from the perspective of our shared dotage. We knew, without question or doubt, that we each were telling our truth, however imperfect it might be. There was no question of trust and integrity on either end of the conversation. There were laughs, some tears and some deep sadness as we learned of the darknesses that have plagued people we knew as successful peers.

Those darknesses were hidden in their specifics from our world on campus. The alcoholic fathers, the mistresses, the demonic mothers, the manipulations and self-immolations that inevitably ensue from tragic and traumatic families of origin, the weddings that were planned without knowing if primary characters might attend…what did our generation know about projection and anima/animus, or bi-polar or PTSD, or ADHD, or genomes or even family violence, except on the occasional movie.

Ours was and is a generation of abundance, even affluence and certainly peace, interrupted by the Cuban missile scare. Dag Hammerskjold, then Secretary General of the United Nations, only birthed in 1947, was a world figure whose name we all knew and whose office we all honoured and respected. John Kennedy’s peccadilloes were off our individual and collective radar, given the compliance of his family, his staff and the national media. Some of us even attended church services where we were interested in learning whatever we being ‘taught’ from the pulpit, and actively reflecting on its meaning and the impact it was having on our lives. Rhetoric, the shaping of phrases and their delivery were as important as the intricacies of the theologies, except that we could and did discern hate or abuse or patronizing transcendence in whatever denomination it reared its head.

We knew war was both futile and abhorrent; we did not know that our factories were as toxic and our waters were being polluted as they were and are. We did not know about the billions of pharmaceuticals that were then emerging from the laboratories many of them toxic and life-destroying, like thalidomide, for example. We went to dances in nurses residences, where the entrance cost was twenty-five cents, and perhaps to a pub for a relatively inexpensive pint.

We did not know about, or even consider the capacity of our banks to take advantage of us, their customers. We did not imagine that our teachers and professors were anything but boring or provocative and stimulating. Their ideology and their core beliefs or attitudes to various social issues were never exposed to us, as were the attitudes and beliefs of our parents never really open to us either. Many of us were the ‘first in our family’ to even attend university given that our parents were factory or retail workers, or occasionally businessmen. Most of our mothers were ‘stay-at-home’ mothers while most of our fathers were bread-winners.

These are not merely nostalgic warm feelings; they are merely pencil lines of our time and place and culture. We did not know about or engage in illicit drugs, or even smoke marijuana. We lived a relatively simple existence, in which the reliable light-houses of faith, learning, commerce, health care and sports were trust-worthy and reliable.

Even our movies and music can now be compared to a paint-by-number canvas or a KD dinner….pablum with a rock-beat, or love songs with a soothing melody. As for our movies, there were good guys and bad guys both chasing the woman or women, and racism even when blazing on the screen was never even noticed let alone mentioned.

Have we, or the culture grown up, matured, become more ethical, more healthy or more dependable….on a few files, perhaps a little, but on the big files, certainly not.

We are still living in the outdated simplicity of those days, fighting the wars of the past with technology that has evolved without bringing our brains and our attitudes forward.

Little wonder we are left mouths gaping when a neighbour declares she gets her news from “podcasts in Utah” and her belief system from a debased and defaced former lying narcissistic occupant of the White House.