I just turned 80. Should I be optimistic or pessimistic?
As I get older, I'm realizing we just have more of the same...
Back in the late 1960s, my baby daughter and I lived with my maternal grandparents. My husband had been deployed overseas for several months, and I went back “home” to spend the time with family.
My grandparents liked to watch the TV news every evening after their early dinner. With the voice of Walter Cronkite narrating, we saw actual images of the war in Vietnam. All the shooting. All the bombing. All the mayhem. And then the weekly body count… this many injured, that many killed.
Right about the same time, we saw the news reports of Martin Luther King being killed as he stood on a walkway at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. (I had no idea that years later I’d be looking up at that same walkway from the motel parking lot.) We’d been seeing news about the riots in red-lined Black districts. The sit-ins at lunch counters. The bus rides to register Black voters. The burning neighborhoods and business districts.
Grandma would sigh and say, “I’m glad I’m old. The world is bad today.”
Things were different when she was young, she said. The wars weren’t in your living rooms, so she perceived them as bloodless fights for freedom. Streets were safer, at least in her memory. But she and Grandpa had lost two children, and they lost their rental properties in the Great Depression, and they saw two sons go off to WWII, not knowing if they would come back. (They did.)
“Don’t worry, Grandma,” I’d say. “We’re OK.” And I really believed it. Life was good, and it was going to get much better. Grandma was seeing things so much differently than I was. I still had the optimism of my young years because… well… she’d been through a lot more than I had.
But now, I’m the same age she was at that time. Actually, a couple of years older. And I look at the distressing news online, and I read the sub stacks, and I talk with my friends about what we can do. And I find myself feeling the same way Grandma did in the middle of the Vietnam War. “I’m glad I’m old. The world is bad.”
Is this what it’s like to get old? Do we inevitably feel disgusted with the world’s political situation? Is it a normal progression for us to imagine that everything is getting worse? (Or… is it really getting worse?)
Recently, I came across some political cartoons and commentary that I saved from about 15 years ago. It surprised me to see that so many of them were addressing the very same issues we’re addressing today. Congressional game playing. The economy. Bad legislation. The environment. International fighting. Poverty. Right versus left. Yadda yadda.
It all seemed overwhelming when we were in the middle of it. But here we are today. The world is still spinning. Many of the things I feared didn’t happen, or we plodded through them and kept going. So, why am I still worried?
Today, I’ve taken my grandmother’s place because my grandchildren and others their age seem to think I worry too much about current politics. Is this what it’s like for everyone? Is this the thing that compels us to jump off the planet as we approach old age? Do people just get tired of the problems? Do they give up on ever solving them? Grandma has trouble with the realities of television. Today, are technology and social media and artificial intelligence too much for us to adapt to?
So, as I step into my eighties, will I continue to grapple with problems that seem to be getting worse? Or will I be glad to leave it all behind for younger people? Will the world think I’ve done a good job in trying to solve these issues? Or, more important… will I think I’ve done a good job?
Here are some of the posts I had on my Facebook site about 15 years ago. Has anything changed?
It was scary times in the 60’s but today the President is mentally and physically ill. He has no checks and balances. The Republicans in control with the Supreme Court allow him to destroy our country. My hope is there are more critical thinking people and we all fight Trump and the spineless coward Republicans before there is no America as we know it.
Happy birthday Donna, a new decade and more to think about. I was a child when you were living the experience you describe here and I remember that time a bit differently.
As a child I didn’t know how government worked or understand prejudice and with this simplistic view couldn’t understand why we were sending troops to fight for “Freedom” while people in our country weren’t free. I agree, our perspective changes as we age and I’m still baffled that as a species, we haven’t evolved more in the last 60 years. Yes, the world’s still turning and indeed, it seems like more of it is metaphorically on the verge of burning.