The Year We Lived in Biblical Times

Does it seem to you that we are living in Biblical times? I mean the Hebrew bible when God struck people down, turned them to salt, and generally acted like a vengeful child?

This is the snarky Sunday edition of Snarky Senior — the newsletter from Erica Manfred, which you can read about here. If you like it and don’t want to miss an issue, you can get it in your inbox by subscribing.

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I’m very glad that 2020 happened at the end of my life not the beginning.  I have no idea how this string of disasters might affect young people for the rest of their lives.  Will they become fearful? Angry?  Radicalized?  Both?   Will they ever feel secure in the world?

  The world we grew up in might as well have been on Mars for all it has in common with the world young people are growing up in now.

When I was young I certainly felt immortal.   I’m sure you did too.  We grew up after WW II, when our country was at its most powerful.   We had rational leaders like Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson.  Strong men whom we might not have agreed with—my family, who were lefties and whose friends were persecuted during the McCarthy era certainly didn’t—but  at least they were predictable.   

We had a level of comfort and affluence never seen before or since.  Until the Reagan era the top tax rate was 70-something percent.  The rich actually paid high taxes which supported the safety net for the rest of us that Roosevelt had created in the New Deal.

I don’t remember anyone who couldn’t afford health care, or who was bankrupted by illness.  There were labor unions which made sure workers made a living wage and got health insurance, and manufacturing still employed huge numbers of workers without advanced degrees at middle class wages. 

 Of course black people never did feel secure, or safe and still don’t.  But I didn’t know any black kids when I was growing up in the New Jersey suburbs—they were all-white enclaves.  When I moved to New York City in my 20s, segregation was so entrenched that the black people I met were like visitors from an exotic country.  They lived in Harlem— which I traveled through daily on my way to City College—but none were in my classes.   I never questioned why.   Even though I came from a family that was staunchly against racism--and bless them for that—blacks and whites simply didn’t mix.   I am ashamed today at how I just took segregation for granted, even though I’d been shocked by the whites only water fountains I’d seen when I’d traveled through the South in the early 60s.

I am not the least bit nostalgic about this era.   Personally I was miserable.  The 1950s, my adolescence, was a terrible time for artists, writers and misfits of any kind.  I didn’t know at the time that I was a writer, but I sure knew I was a misfit.  I considered myself a “beatnik” and I traveled to Greenwich Village from New Jersey to hang out at Washington Square on weekends and listen to folk music.    

I don’t long for the stifling conformity of the 1950s and early 60s.   I actually tried to get a job at an ad agency in the 60s, the Mad Men era,  but J. Walter Thompson wasn’t hiring fat girls who wore ill-fitting clothes no matter how smart and competent. 

Actually my nostalgia is only for the beautiful natural world I got to enjoy before pollution and climate change turned it into a potential tinder keg.   I’m nostalgic for a time when pandemics only happened in 1918.  A time when I took for granted there would never be another pandemic and if there was modern medicine would control it.  I also took for granted that I would always be able to swim in the pristine country lake at the resort my parents took me to on weekends—a lake that is now covered with algae in the summer. 

I’m nostalgic for a time when it was unthinkable for a president to call people he didn’t like mocking names…a time when his predecessor, a name-calling senator, Joe McCarthy, could actually be silenced by an honorable man saying, “Have you no shame, sir.”   Can you imagine that even slowing Trump down, much less stopping him?

I think that’s the scariest thing about this moment.  There are no brakes, nothing to slow things down, no one to restore sanity.  I hope the election does that, but between the availability of guns and the rage of Trump supporters I somehow doubt it.

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Snarky Senior" is for those of us who qualify for a senior discount, but aren’t content with the crap we can buy with it. Subscribe for an irreverent take on life, culture, media, aging, health, politics and everything else about aging as a rebel—with or without a cause.  Snarky Senior will send you short takes and deeper dives on the humiliations and ironies of aging in America. 

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