Last week, Chloe, a friend for more than 60 years, sent me an email. Another classmate had died. True to life, we continue to lose those members of the Class of ’58 who have all scattered beyond Carmel, N.Y., but remained a safe harbor, if only in memories. Each of us has left the close fold of Carmel High School, building other relationships and friends, but retaining that sense of belonging that is almost magical. All of these connections have helped to shape who we are, what we know and believe, providing a guiding context for our lives, defining who we are, what we hold dear, our belief systems, right, left and middle.
It has long been an observation that, with the industrial revolution, the status of the elderly in society has changed. Once revered for the lifetime accumulation of knowledge and experience, the older members of society have fallen prey to the rapid nature of change.
As we age, as Longfellow so sadly wrote, the world changes. We lose those connections, finding what we know and believe to be … outdated? Irrelevant? Obsolescent? closer to being the” last leaf” … an aloneness and isolation that has psychological, sociological and medical implications.
It wasn’t too long ago that Excellus asked its members to share ideas about how to counter the loneliness of age, with the implication that finding solutions was as important as treatment with pharmaceuticals.
This loneliness can be a loss of purpose, friends, loved ones, connections to the changing world, the ability to identify with ideas and behaviors that have become common for those younger, becoming “strangers in a strange land.”
As obvious as the effect of change on the older portion of our population, less notable is the effect of the same forces on other subsets of society.
Last Sunday, one of the columnists in the Post, analyzing the roots of the Jan. 6 insurrection, pointed out that, in a rapidly changing culture, some will be left behind, will become what is a favorite adjective these days, marginalized. They feel that their ideas, their moral code, their friends, their reality is been devalued and replaced by another reality.
The life blood and the vulnerability of democracy is that, when the movement of ideas clash, some will gain credence while other will lose support. The right to push back, to find ways to solidify one’s world view in that marketplace, has many rejecting the slower, more tedious work that maintaining one’s world view in in a democracy requires. A wily demagogue can capture this discontent and harness it for his or her purposes. Read your history books about the fallout from World War I in Germany and the rise of Hitler and I am sure that you can see parallels in the headlines today.
Just as my insurance company is seeking creative ideas to ameliorate the effect of loneliness among the older members of society, there probably should be an equal effort to find ways to accommodate the effects of rapid technological and societal change throughout our culture. Immediate to this is the concept of basing one’s actions on verifiable facts rather than the misinformation that has so easily divided us. The sense of aloneness is not the sole property of the older portion of our population; aloneness is the malady that affects those who feel they are not heard.
In a functioning democracy, it takes work by everyone to maintain an equilibrium among all competing ideas. Maintaining the processes by which all sides have a voice is difficult, particularly when one or more subcultures resort to misinformation and violence. The shocking news that the spouse of the Speaker of the House was attacked in his home, that the attacker was searching for “Nancy” to torture her, is beyond belief. This was not the action of some solitary Wakadoo, but rather the carefully-cultivated actions spurred on by disinformation and concocted conspiracy theories accepted by many who are among the discontented marginalized.
This morning, one news program discussed the threats made to the individuals who work on elections in Georgia, an example of the growing resort to violence that will only eliminate those processes that support democratic discourse.
By the time this is published, the midterm elections will have been finalized, that is, unless those who lost declare the election to be “rigged.” The far-more-than-annoying television ads that use guilt by association, awful pictures and downright fabrication are over. The lawn signs will be gone.
What happens next is always up to all of us. Pundits tell us that we have been moved closer to losing what our founding father’s established, closer to dictatorial rule that promotes the interests of those who enable its power, a careful progression made possible by separating the electorate into hostile groups. It’s easy to identify people by their political stance rather than all of the ways that people are. The right, the left, the middle and the remaining members of the Carmel High School Class of “58 have to move across the chasms so purposely created to divide and conquer our democratic institutions by once again talking, connections, listening, debating and understanding that we all have to live in this world together.
