We need older folks now more than ever
We need more old people in this country. That’s what I’ve decided.
This is not a revelation that came to me all in a rush. But spend 18 months, as I did, trying to elect Hillary Clinton president, watching up close as the Donald Trump carnival slowly unfurled itself, and you can’t help but start asking yourself some existential questions about how we ended up where we are.
And one thing I keep coming back to is that we, as a country, don’t really understand what it means to know something. I mean really know it.
I think I know what happened in the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, but if some Civil War scholar came up with something that altered our understanding of that event, who am I to tell him otherwise? I only know what I’ve read. But I know what happened in the Anita Hill hearings because I was a senior in college then and I watched them on TV every day. I lived through that time, it made a real impression on me, and my understanding of the dynamics in play would be much harder for a scholar, or anyone else, to alter. That’s really knowing something.
And while that knowledge might prove of use if we ever again appoint a Supreme Court justice, at the moment, at least, that isn’t what our country is up against. No, we’re in a very different place, a place that feels very dark. And as we grope our way through these early days of Trump, I wonder if all of this could have been avoided if only our collective institutional memory was a little clearer.
Because I’m guessing having George Wallace, circa 1964, stored somewhere in your memory bank might help you to recognize an ideological descendent in 2016. And if you marched into the teeth of Jim Crow, fought on the beaches of Normandy or fled to this country to avoid the atrocities happening over there, my guess is you are less likely to be snowed by the so-called “alt-right,” or so quick to dismiss it as inconsequential.
Our country is, at bottom, a 229-yearold constitution. But the experiences each of us has here in America during the short times we are alive have just as much to do with the prejudices and predispositions of our contemporaries, and how they are expressed through, and shape, the political process. In that sense the America we experience is captive to the enlightenment, or the lack thereof, of our peers. And it makes you wonder if the hard-earned wisdom of generations past die with them, and if the rest of us are doomed to learn lessons that should never have to be re-learned, only to have those too be forgotten when we pass on.
Of course, you could say it was those old people who allowed McCarthyism to take hold in the first place, got mired in Vietnam, set up Jim Crow, etc. I mean, Donald Trump is 70 years old, so how much does age really help?
And that’s all true. I have no illusions about the mistakes of the past, or the imperfections of those who made them. I only wish that important lessons could retain their vitality and presence in the public square, even as those who learned them begin to fade away. One likes to think that’s the hallmark of a mature nation, but then this happens, and Brexit, and the various hard-right factions making gains across Europe and the globe, and you wonder just how hard you have to look to find one these days.
In the interest of full disclosure, I vetted all of this with my 81-year-old father before publishing. He agreed that firsthand experience can be a helpful inoculation against the resurgence of age old ideological viruses, but he thought it was young people speaking up who would really make the difference. And maybe that’s just how it works depending on where you are in your life — you see the answers in front of you or behind. Or maybe we’re both right. Or maybe it doesn’t matter because if you care about democracy and are invested in this country its all-hands-on-deck time.
So old people: Don’t die. We need you now more than ever.