Ninety and four! By the time you are reading this, Good Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise, I will be celebrating the ninety-fourth anniversary of my birth, an event I certainly never expected to occur. In 1931 the life expectancy for a male baby was sixty-seven years. As I was growing up, I became comfortable with the concept that one’s ordained life span was “three score and ten”. Consequently, the last twenty-four years have been an unanticipated bonus for me. Whenever I ponder why I have been gifted with this longevity, I vacillate back and forth between two extremes — predestination (somewhere an angel is writing the book of my life) and evolutionary science (everything that happens is a random occurrence) — and I eventually conclude that my best bet is to ignore the “why” and focus on the “how” of life.
Being ninety-four years old I am obliged to pass on some wisdom. My specific concept of wisdom is a combination of experience, memory, and objective judgment, which provides the chronologically challenged seer with a perspective that is not available to much younger persons. Most recently my perspective has focused on gratitude, moderation, tolerance, and forgiveness.
I am indeed grateful for the many blessings that I continue to receive – life, health (physical and mental), family, friends, etc. An interesting, albeit mixed, blessing is intellectual curiosity. For some reason it is necessary for me to investigate everything I encounter that I don’t immediately recognize or understand. My reading is constantly being interrupted by coming across a word or a reference that is unfamiliar. Fortunately, the search engine capability of my smart phone or laptop quickly comes to the rescue, except for the numerous occasions where it merely introduces some other unfamiliar term and starts me down the well-known “rabbit-hole”, or into a circular definition like the “dung/excrement/feces” mystery I encountered as a very young reader.
Because of my advanced age I have a different perspective on the “creature comforts” we enjoy today. I do remember the depths of the Depression, when half the households in Bridgeville had incomes at or below the official poverty level. Our family was fortunate – we lived in a modest but comfortable home and owned an automobile, albeit a bottom-of-the-line Ford. We were certainly at the upper end of the middle class economically. My parents couldn’t begin to imagine the way their children would live, let alone the life-style that their grand-children enjoy today. In 1940 their generation was worried about having enough serviceable clothing to meet their needs – today’s generation is worried about having large enough closets and dressers to hold all their clothing. They worried about affording an automobile – their descendants worry about having enough parking spaces for all their vehicles.
I continue to be convinced that the majority of society’s problems are caused by the fact that there are too many of us and that we are too greedy. The year I was born, the population of the United States was about 125 million; today it is 342 million. The explosion of the world’s population is even more drastic – 2.1 billion to 8.2 billion! It is no wonder our environment is overstressed. And, we have outstripped our ability to pay for all our benefits without massive borrowing. The national debt is now 36.6 trillion dollars, $108,000 per person. I am convinced that the only solution is for all of us to accept a lower standard of living (paying more taxes). I cannot find data for 1931, but I was able to determine that the median household income in 1939 was $1,326, which, adjusted for inflation, is $30,447 in 2023, while the median household income in 2023 was $80,610. The standard of living increased well over 250 percent in the intervening years. Is it too much to ask current generations to tighten their belts enough (by paying higher taxes) to balance the federal budget? Not at all, from the perspective of this nonagenarian.
Moderation should be an easy concept to sell, but from the earliest days of our nation we have functioned as extremists. Nonetheless, the Declaration of Independence was approved only when moderates agreed to remove language condemning slavery, to appease the South Carolina extremists. Somehow we must find a way to reconcile our differences by compromise, however difficult that may be. I firmly believe the vast majority of our citizens today would accept resolution of most of our contentious issues by making concessions, but the extremists who rule both parties prefer to fight it out and jerk society back and forth each time their party takes over.
One key to achieving moderation is tolerance. If there is a single area in which my attitude to life has changed as I grew older, it is tolerance. I am sure that that is primarily because I have consistently had experiences that convinced me that folks who see things differently than I do often have a sound basis for their opinions. Mister know-it-all has been proven wrong much too frequently. One must accept the idea that one’s adversary has a right to his/her opinion before he is able to attempt to understand it. Forgiveness continues to be difficult for me. Intellectually I know it is right and proper; nonetheless I still find it very easy to continue to carry a grudge. Even the most sincere apology can be difficult for me to accept.
Despite the turmoil and chaos that our current administration is creating, I remain optimistic about the future. The small corner of the world that I inhabit is populated by good people, many of whom are misguided (in my opinion) by extremists. I hope their cumulative reaction to our current situation is a return to a society dominated by moderate centrists who want what is best for most of us, while still maintaining concern for all the minorities.