Courtesy of wikipedia.org
I’m delighted to see the energy, money, and number of volunteers behind Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. I’m also excited that the country may soon have its first female President. Nonetheless, I continue to despair that ageism felled Joe Biden’s bid for a second term, and that the nation turned its back on someone historians predict will be revered as one of our greatest Presidents.
I admit that a few elders I talked with felt Biden was too old for a second term, but mainly, I blame the young for his overthrow. I understand why. Young people view life differently from the old. The world is new to them, which means their brains are locked in a processing mode. Building the scaffolding upon which to hang information takes masses of energy, a task their elders have already accomplished. So, while the young binge on collating information, seniors develop their ideas based on patterns they derive from experience. (Happiness Is a Choice You Make, by John Leland, Thorndike Press, 2018, pg. 136 – Large Print edition.)
People in their middle years sneer at folks at both ends of the spectrum. The young they accuse of living in joyful folly. The old are guilty of senile nattering. (Ibid, pg. 147.) From my perspective, those in their middle years suffer from a surfeit of knowing a little about a lot of things but lacking sufficient self-doubt.
Self-doubt is attributable to old age, not the pimply kind that plagues teenagers, but the kind that derives from remembering, reviewing, and contemplating. Being ancient, I admit to wallowing in contemplation. For the most part, all I’ve gleaned from the activity are questions. I wonder, for example, how the young who have never been old can have so many opinions about the condition. Also, I’m curious to know why they place so much value on extending life when they are contemptuous of those who manage it.
One of my favorite book titles is, The Fools In Town Are On Our Side. For me, the words encapsulate a Cosmic joke. With age, or in a quiet moment, we sometimes glimpse that folly– after we’ve leaped like lemurs among society’s branches, legal, religious, and moral, to establish our tribal membership. We call that quiet insight being Woke.
Or, it might also be described as intimations of natural harmony. A tree leaf learns it by osmosis but humans, hampered by reason, glimpse it through heightened consciousness. The joke played at our expense is that whatever we see can’t be shared. Language is too imperfect and ever-changing. Based on its title, consider why the 1942 novel, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay might be banned from libraries today.
Patriarchy is a word I’ve gnawed on for much of my life. Falling from the lips of Republican men, I know to gird my loins. When it falls from the lips of allies, however, I am gobsmacked. Take the Democratic pundit, James Carville as an example.
I’d expect that he and I could sit down for coffee and never feel the urge to toss our cups at one another. Yet his recent media comments about the 2024 Presidential election set my patience on fire. He complains that women are too preachy and that the Party’s message is too feminine. Talk like that makes him sound adolescent. Isn’t “too preachy” Huck Finn’s criticism of Aunt Sally? What’s more, when Carville advises women to listen to men more because they represent 48% of the population, I’m torn between a desire to laugh or throw up. Women represent 52% of the population, and after centuries of living under minority rule, it’s time for them to be heard.
If uppity women want to sue for world harmony or DEI, it’s the pundit and those like him who should listen. The fair sex is saying they’ve grown weary of birthing babies only to see them become cannon fodder.
Wokeness is a cry for amity. So far, history has been a masculine spectacle of violence and talk about wars to end wars with no consciousness of the absurdity of that objective. Gentlemen, fifty-two percent of the population is saying, “Enough!”
Men and women are natural allies, helpmates, and lovers. Yet were I to create an adage for the centuries, I’d modify Sun Tzu’s admonition. “Keep your friends close and keep your enemies closer” My advice to my sisters would be the reverse. “Keep your enemies close and your friends closer because sometimes the fools in town are on our side.
