Ten Ways Everything Truly Does Suck
I tend to be a relatively cheery fellow, but some important things have very much not been going our way. To wit:
10. All that intolerant religious stuff: folks not known for turning cheeks or loving enemies imposing their own views of abortion or morality on the rest of us.
9. Alcohol has really—and this sure looks like one they are not going to change their minds about—turned out to be bad for you, even that one modest glass of wine you were thinking of sipping this evening.
8. Rock ‘n’ roll has finally and conclusively proven not here to stay. It grew. It peaked as an explosive force in the culture with soul music, the Beatles, Dylan, the Stones and, maybe, punk. But by the standard to which so many 20th-century artists in all genres subscribed—those not busy doing something that feels new are busy dying—rock began rolling over and playing dead well before the turn of the century. Tell Bruce Springsteen the news. Beyonce and Billie Eilish are quite good. And I’m glad my granddaughter has found Taylor Swift. But my grandson listens exclusively to rap. And—hey, hey—that’s where much of the creative energy is today.
7. Our politicians have repeatedly disappointed: Joe, Andrew, Hillary with the stupid email server, Spitzer, Bill, Dukakis, Lyndon, Hubert. Even Barack, who might have stimulated the economy more and has shied away from a leadership role in the fight to save democracy from Trump.
6. It has grown harder to be proud to be an American. We were born into a United States that played a (the?) major role in the defeat of fascism. But this country’s role in the world started going downhill shortly thereafter. We lived through an America that undertook misguided, mostly unsuccessful and terribly bloody wars and coups against Communist and then Islamic regimes. The wars have stopped for the moment, unless you count blowing up random unarmed Venezuelan boats. But the current leaders of this country, while abandoning humanitarian aid in the poorer parts of the world, seem eager to support many of the most reactionary, intolerant, unintelligent and corrupt parties around the world.
5. Russia, China, Hungary, Venezuela and Turkey have slid in the past few decades, back into despotism. This despite the thrilling—if often short-lived—democracy movements in the final decades of the previous century. (Ah, for those halcyon days when history had ended!) And as for once socialist Israel? Oy vey!
4. The planet is, indeed, warming. Okay the Maldives are still above water and Miami has not flooded much…yet. But when it actually snowed in New York City the other day it seemed an occasion for celebration. And on some summer days smoke from Canada turns the sky red or orange or pink or brown. And LA caught on fire. Meanwhile, coral, polar bears, bumblebees, countless other species and maybe the ecosystem in general remain under threat.
3. Disease persists. We are getting a wee bit long in the tooth—or maybe not so wee and maybe not just a bit. And if only teeth were our only problem. I don’t want to sound too ungrateful here. Yes, they subdued polio just in time for most of us. And we probably stopped smoking in time and finally made our way to a gym. And yes, AIDS, belatedly but crucially, became treatable. We have indeed made inroads on cancer, and we are much more likely to avoid or survive heart attacks than our dads were. But that Covid epidemic was really scary. And there are still a whole lot of frightening diseases out there wrecking people’s lives—the lives of people our age in particular. If we don’t get hit by a car first, we are going to get sick.
2. Donald Trump is again ensconced in the White House, or what is left of it. Yeah, that vain, undereducated, pigheaded, belligerent, bigoted student of Roy Cohn—is currently and unaccountably president of the United States, once again. And he’s getting more stuff done this time. So just about every terrible anti-democratic, corrupt, racist, anti-immigrant, misogynist, anti-science, deeply dumb thing you feared might happen has happened, except a war and, as of this writing, a recession.
1. Death looms. So far no one has invented a cure for old age. And the time remaining for us beyond that so far is rapidly diminishing. Maybe AGI will come up with some miraculous way our buckets might remain unkicked—besides just replacing all us humans with sturdier, easier-to-repair machines. But it is becoming increasingly clear that human immortality, if it ever arrives, won’t arrive quickly enough for our generation. And we products of the baby boom, like all members of all previous generations, will, in the fullness of time or sooner, die.