Sunday, June 29, 2008
Opinion

No Country for Old Men

Do we want Obama as our president, or do we simply despise the idea of having someone in the White House who will constantly remind us of our mortality?

By Stephanie Ramage

Last week, in a segment titled “Age Likely to be Key Factor in Presidential Race,” a National Public Radio reporter randomly interviewed a young woman about GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s age.

“Her world changed after 9/11,” the reporter said of the college student. “She was in junior high …”

No surprise there. My world changed after 52 Americans were held hostage in Iran for 444 days. Jimmy Carter was president of the United States at the time and I, like the young woman on NPR, was in junior high. It was demoralizing that the most powerful nation on earth was being forced to bow to a crazed fundamentalist regime.

But the fact is that everyone’s world changes in junior high, and national tragedies seem even more vivid and terrifying then than they will just 10 years later. That’s the kind of thing you learn with age. Not that the wisdom of age would count for much with this young woman and her cohorts. She said she didn’t find John McCain’s candidacy appealing because he is “old” and then noted his disability: “Someone said he can’t really lift his arms.”

The Democratic primary contest between Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama taught the world that America is far more sexist than racist, and it looks as though this fall’s contest will teach the world that we are more ageist than racist. It is difficult, no doubt, to be a member of a racial minority, but it’s even more difficult to be old. And as the NPR interviewee’s remarks show, as bad as it may be to be old, it’s even worse to be disabled. If today’s America had the choice of electing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the greatest leaders in modern history, I doubt that it would do so. FDR was 50 years old when he was elected in 1932, and at that time, when the average life expectancy was just past 70, that was old. He was also disabled.

Today, we equate age with illness, uselessness, and poverty. We spend outrageous money to fool ourselves into believing that we will cheat time itself: We buy Botox, we buy facelifts, we buy implants, we buy drugs to counteract flaccidity so that we may recapture, if not the passion of youth, then at least its physical manifestation. And so, those who look their age, those who do not lie about their advanced years, seem hopelessly unhip to us. And we can only assume that since they will not erase their wrinkles, they must not have the money to do so. According to the 2000 Census, the American population is older than it has ever been. The first wave of the huge Baby Boomer generation is in its 60s, and it speaks volumes about the Boomers’ self-image that they consider McCain’s age a factor in the presidential race.

When my 11 year-old son and I discussed the presidential race recently, he said “McCain’s old. If we get attacked, he might have a heart attack.” My son, who is a drummer, has been attending a wonderful summer camp called Chicago Joe’s Rockin’ Blues Camp, and when he and his band mates played the Queen classic “Hammer to Fall” a couple of weeks ago, they may have thought they had unearthed some lyrics relevant to the war in Iraq. But when the song came out in 1984, the year I graduated high school, most of us thought its title referred to the hammer laid across the sickle on the flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. My generation grew up waiting for that hammer to fall. The lyrics “What the hell are we fighting for? Just surrender and it won’t hurt at all” sounded like the Free World’s invitation to the people of the Communist empire to come into its embrace.

I will never forget the thrill I felt in 1989 when I watched Berliners take sledgehammers to their city’s hated wall, the one that separated the democratized West from a place where people who dared to write or speak critically about their government were imprisoned or killed. The hammer did indeed fall, but we failed to embrace the people who had lived under it. President George H. W. Bush didn’t seize the moment. President Bill Clinton was content to say that the world was safe and to radically downsize our military. It would have made a great deal of sense to substantially assist a struggling, nascent Russian democracy in the days after Gorbachev, but we did not and we are beginning to pay for that even now.

To know this, you would have had to have lived through it. No one speaks of it.
Not long ago, I walked into a coffee shop in Decatur and was immediately put off by the long line waiting for service. “Jeez,” I said to the man standing next to me. “It looks like a Soviet bread line in here.”

He had gray hair and was clearly at least my age and probably older, but he said, “I wouldn’t know. It was before my time.”

He seemed to notice how my gaze moved over what might have been evidence of a face-lift, and he added defiantly, “All that was propaganda, anyway.”

Then I knew with sickening clarity just how badly our country has been damaged by our obsession with youth. We purposely pretend not to know history because we do not wish to acknowledge the years that have passed.

Sen. Barack Obama is almost 50 years old, certainly no spring chicken, though he appears to be one next to 71-year-old McCain. Do we want Obama as our president, or do we simply despise the idea of having someone in the White House who will constantly remind us of our mortality?

Perhaps we need that reminder, like the memento mori that Europeans kept around their homes in the Middle Ages—skulls to remind them that one day they would die. We will, you know. Every last one of us. But before that happens, if you survive your youth, whether you are black or white or male or female, you—and I—will be old.

Isn’t it time we came to terms with that? SP