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elfsOne of the things I was able to do in the past year or so was hang out with my “brother-in-law.” He’s not really; my mother never married his father– they got really close to it when he developed Alzheimers and she spent his last years being his caretaker in exchange for which his family is taking care of her in her last years. Mom’s still sharp as a tack, though, and generally lives quite independently.
Election patterns
There’s been a lot of chatter recently about whether or not Gen-X is getting more conservative, taking on the same attitudes and beliefs as the Boomers before them, as they age. There is that old saying that you get more conservative as you get older although the truth is more disturbing: it’s that the wealthier you are the more conservative you become, and the wealthier you are the longer you live. Older people with liberal attitudes tend to be poorer, and therefore die younger. Eventually you end up with a population that’s nothing but decrepit, wealthy enough to afford decrepitude, and reactionary enough to any threats to that wealth to be nothing but “conservative.” Older liberals are simply dying off faster. (Although, to be honest, COVID-19 may reverse that trend.) Gen-X is showing that pattern more strongly than any other; Boomers, on the other hand, are starting to realize that, no really, the Republicans want to take away their Meedicare and Social Security.
So he and I are of the same age, and being with him and a couple of his friends, I’ve come to realize why. These are all wealthy men: lawyers, doctors, commercial real estate bigwigs at the top of their game. And to a man, they are done. They’ve made their money. They’ve played the game their whole lives. What they want now is the reward: they want reality to be unchanging between now and when Death comes to claim them. They earned their place in the reality they endured; now they want to enjoy it without having to do anything more. They don’t want any new apps on their phones; they don’t want to learn how to drive an electric car; they don’t want to have to memorize your pronouns or learn how to respect you if you don’t fit the categories they’ve understood their whole lives.
And that’s really it. They fought for a place near the top of the Great Chain of Being, completely unaware of how heritage and luck (and heritage is luck; they had the good fortune to be born to wealthy parents after all) played its role in putting them there. They think they deserve the world they have, and resent any idea that they would have to live in a newer, different, more complicated one.
I’m queer and neurodivergent. The first means I can never afford to be “done;” the world is still constantly working to figure out “why queer people and can they be ‘fixed,’ and if not, should they just be killed?” The latter means I don’t want to be “done;” the new world, the one coming, is still more interesting than the old one, still more beautiful, still full of interesting people, still alive, and I hope to keep it that way as long as possible.
Election patterns
There’s been a lot of chatter recently about whether or not Gen-X is getting more conservative, taking on the same attitudes and beliefs as the Boomers before them, as they age. There is that old saying that you get more conservative as you get older although the truth is more disturbing: it’s that the wealthier you are the more conservative you become, and the wealthier you are the longer you live. Older people with liberal attitudes tend to be poorer, and therefore die younger. Eventually you end up with a population that’s nothing but decrepit, wealthy enough to afford decrepitude, and reactionary enough to any threats to that wealth to be nothing but “conservative.” Older liberals are simply dying off faster. (Although, to be honest, COVID-19 may reverse that trend.) Gen-X is showing that pattern more strongly than any other; Boomers, on the other hand, are starting to realize that, no really, the Republicans want to take away their Meedicare and Social Security.
So he and I are of the same age, and being with him and a couple of his friends, I’ve come to realize why. These are all wealthy men: lawyers, doctors, commercial real estate bigwigs at the top of their game. And to a man, they are done. They’ve made their money. They’ve played the game their whole lives. What they want now is the reward: they want reality to be unchanging between now and when Death comes to claim them. They earned their place in the reality they endured; now they want to enjoy it without having to do anything more. They don’t want any new apps on their phones; they don’t want to learn how to drive an electric car; they don’t want to have to memorize your pronouns or learn how to respect you if you don’t fit the categories they’ve understood their whole lives.
And that’s really it. They fought for a place near the top of the Great Chain of Being, completely unaware of how heritage and luck (and heritage is luck; they had the good fortune to be born to wealthy parents after all) played its role in putting them there. They think they deserve the world they have, and resent any idea that they would have to live in a newer, different, more complicated one.
I’m queer and neurodivergent. The first means I can never afford to be “done;” the world is still constantly working to figure out “why queer people and can they be ‘fixed,’ and if not, should they just be killed?” The latter means I don’t want to be “done;” the new world, the one coming, is still more interesting than the old one, still more beautiful, still full of interesting people, still alive, and I hope to keep it that way as long as possible.
