Lowering the Boom(ers)

February 10, 2007 by djackson.

“Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” - King Lear, Act I/Scene V

Attention Baby Boomers:  You’re getting old.

You can’t prevent it.  Your bones will grow thin.  You’ll lose muscle mass and reaction time and your faces will wrinkle like the seat of a cheap pair of chinos after a six-hour flight in coach.  Then you’ll die.  Your sheer numbers cannot protect you from the fate of all flesh.  Like King Lear, Shakespeare’s classic arrested adolescent, you meant to stay young forever and only ended up deserving a spanking for being “old before thy time.”  You aren’t special; you aren’t exceptional; you aren’t privileged.  You are a little pathetic.

While you can’t avoid aging, you can remain perpetually immature.  That’s one reason you’re dying off faster than necessary.  A current television add (TV has always been your epistemology, hasn’t it?) features Dennis Hopper snearing that “you’re going to rewrite the book on retirement” because he “just doesn’t see you playing shuffleboard.”  But it seems that a little shuffleboard might not be a bad idea:  accidents involving things like motorcycles, hang gliding, mountain climbing and jet skis bumped off a cool 31.5K of you in 2003.  About one in ten of you check out by this means, the gruesome tithe of your cohort.

Then there’s drugs.  You keep on coking and toking like you still had young bodies that could handle the abuse.  You don’t.  That’s why, though only accounting for twenty-six percent of the population, you rack up half of the drug-related deaths.  You cannot say with Shakespeare’s aging manservant Adam,

. . .in my youth I never did apply

Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood,

Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo

The means of weakness and debility;

Therefore my age is as a lusty winter,

Frosty, but kindly.

You applied hot and rebellious liquors in your blood until your corpuscles are practically phosphorescent, and wooed the means of debility like a streetwalker hustling a Shriner.  Your age is more like a nuclear winter, the permafrost of a fried ecosystem.

Then there’s suicide.  You’ve always led the league in this category.  At last count, one-third of self-inflicted deaths came from your generation.  A lot of that seems to stem from the fact that you rejected religious belief and got divorced a lot.  You set yourself free from God and from duty . . . and from the kind of support that makes life worth living when you’re no longer young and beautiful. 

Between the plastic surgeons and the celebrity diet gurus and the riotous triumph of style over substance, nobody ever took the time to tell you (and let’s face it, you weren’t much good at listening) that perpetual childishness is the opposite of Bob Dylan’s deep benediction that you “stay forever young.”  Your upstart gurus tricked you into valuing youth as an end in itself, and lied by hiding the fact (or maybe not hiding it; they probably didn’t know themselves) that youth, like all expressions of time, is merely a currency which cannot be kept but only invested.  Instead of trading youth for wisdom, you clung to youth, forfeited wisdom, and still didn’t manage to stay young. 

But it isn’t too late.  Time is merciless, but God is both timeless and merciful.  The author of the Ninetieth Psalm recognized that three-score and ten was a decent run, and four-score was borrowed time.  Instead of asking for a longer life, he decided to pray for a better one.  “So teach us to number our days,” he supplicates, “That we may present to You a heart of wisdom.” 

I’m a generational nomad.  I came along at the ebb tide of the Boomers, too soon to be a Buster or an X-er or a Nexter, and anyway I was raised by wolves and taught to say “sir” and “ma’am” and save my money for later and sex for marriage and how to tie a windsor knot.  But I’ve long admired the aged savants and aspired to join their number.  The chronology is out of my control; I’ll do what I can about the savvy.  And I invite you to get off your Harley and join me.

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