OK, now, lissen up.
I’m almost old enough to qualify as an old fart – not as old
as some of you old farts out there, but old enough so that anyone under 50
would consider me so. That means I get to say what’s on my mind, and you have
to shut up and listen.
I’m speaking mostly to the rest of you old farts out there –
you know who you are. If you’re over 50, I’m talking to you, and if you’re
younger than 50 but have an old-fart, easily-scared, self-aggrandizing,
self-satisfied brain with opinions and attitudes that haven’t changed in years,
I’m talking to you, too.
It’s time for us to step down. Not all the way down – the
youngsters need to have a few of us around to go to when they can’t make sense
out of the tangled mess we’ve made of rules and regulations and how to get those
things cleaned up – but we need to shut up, gird our loins, and stop thinking
about ourselves and start listening to, and supporting, the youngsters who are
brave enough to say there isn’t any time to fart around anymore – there are
some things we need to change radically, right now, damn the consequences to
our portfolios and our commerce, before we’re all sucked into the lowest pit of
Hell.
Yes, it will be hard; yes, it will mess with your comfortable old-fart
lives and pocketbooks and long-held beliefs – but if we don’t do it, there won’t
be a future to be hopeful about. And even if you’re a really old fart, you may
live long enough to regret that.
We screwed things up, and we need to admit it, and we old
farts don’t have the guts or drive or imagination or honesty to fix it or power
the changes needed to see it through. The best we can do is to do something
else, Joe Biden and the foolish, foolish DNC, or act as mentors and help-meets
for the younger folks, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. You two have ideas
we need, but we need young people with the vision who will be around and vital
– really, really vital - for the next 20 years to implement them. Be a loud
cheerleader, Bernie, but don’t try to do it yourself, it’s too late. Share your
mind and your plans, Elizabeth, but recognize that your time was four years
ago, and you didn’t take it.
We need people who will do what needs to be done and do it really
quickly. It may already be too late to save us – the nation, the environment,
the human race - but if we fart around for another four years, it surely
will be. There’s a lot to be done, and it’s going to make everyone with an old-fart
brain really unhappy. And all I can say about that is: tough. You blew it. We
blew it. We continue to blow it.
The environment has to be dealt with, and if it screws up a
lot of corporations, too bad – you’ll reap what you sowed. There are going to
be a lot more immigrants, more and more and more, in large part because of the
environment we screwed up, and we’ve got to stop being mean and nasty and deal
with them fairly and honorably and accept them as fellow human beings. We have
to clean up the messes we made that are destroying their homelands, their
lives, their safety, and welcome them into whatever parts of the world still
work.
There has to be an end to violence, and that means a radical
and immediate response to the ridiculous gun culture we have in this country,
and major rethinking of international relations, and a big, big change in our
individual attitudes towards everyone else who inhabits our world – our
neighbors, strangers we meet in the community, all those groups of people about
whom we’ve developed ignorant attitudes; those attitudes we cling to because
they make us feel superior, or safer, or sager. We can no longer afford to run
politics, international relations, immigrant policies, and adress people we don’t know, as the obviously superior us vs. the
obviously deficient and dangerous them – we’re all of us we now, and we need to restructure our brains to get that.
There has to be a radical change in our attitude towards the
human right to health care – the more expensive of which has mostly been made
necessary because of the way we old farts messed up food, air, water, and more
– and we need to change our attitude towards housing. No one should die because
they can’t afford decent - or any - health care. No one should live on a park bench, or
huddled into tents in the winter, or under bridges, or in housing that’s
unsanitary, unsafe, unreliable. No one. No one.
There needs to be an immediate end to cozening people with
more money than they know what to do with. You made your money on the backs of
other people, and quite likely from encouraging or promoting the destruction of
the environment, food, health care, housing, and paying your employees sub-decent wages. Get over it. You owe your fellow
human beings – we all owe our fellow
human beings - decent health, a comfortable and safe place to live, sanitary
conditions, nutritious and sufficient food, healthy air and water, dignity,
education, and respect for their varied cultural and religious beliefs. We need
to start paying a living wage. We need to start pushing, against our own
over-inflated interests, for just laws and social systems.
Some of these changes are going to take a lot of money – and
it’s going to have to come from those of you with too much. Capitalism, the way
we play it, the way we’ve allowed it to develop, the way we’ve let it warp our
democratic process and our vision as a just and honorable nation, has failed
the majority of us and enriched too few, and that means somebodies are going to
have to cough up a fair share to fix, and keep fixed, what’s gone very, very
wrong.
And some of these changes, and others you know in your gut need
to be made that I haven’t mentioned, are going to take some serious
self-examination, a willingness to assume your truth isn’t the only, or the
best, truth, and a willingness to give up your self-serving ideas – a soul tax,
so to speak, and it’ll be a big one for some of us.
It’s going to be painful. Old farts don’t like change,
especially when it means you have to adjust to something new. When maybe you
have to give up some of your shiny toys so someone else can eat, or have some
warm clean clothes, or a place that’s safe to sleep, or get medical treatment.
And those of you who are going to have to live with restrictions on your gun
toys – you’re not getting any sympathy, here. You’ve had plenty of time to
self-regulate, and you haven’t done it; you blew it. It’s time now for the rest
of us to protect our children, people sad enough to commit suicide, domestic
partners of angry gun-owners, friends with guns who’ve had too much to drink,
and those wing-nuts amongst us who have no sense of human decency and too much
to prove…
So - tough. We screwed it up – we can only hope the next
generation can fix the messes we’ve made fast enough. So suck it up, old farts
– big breath, deep gulp, open that wallet, don’t fight the fixes, be part of
the saving of our future, and shut up unless you have something truly useful to
say.
I’ll meet you there.
For the blog, 1 July 2019
From the Edge of Darkness: 18
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