I’ve been running on fumes this week. I think my age is starting to catch up with me. I normally can leave the house by 8, do a full work day, run to rehearsal, get home around 9:30 or 10, feed the cats and then lather rinse repeat. This week I’ve been straining to keep that up and I’ve had a couple of nights where I’ve felt exhausted by six pm, and I’ve fallen asleep at my desk and while being chauffeured to house calls by other staff more than is my usual want. Could be that my over sixty body and brain are calling on me to slow down a bit. Could be that the energies drained by three years of pandemic have somewhat altered my usual sleep/wake cycle. Could be a lack of caffeine in the system (although my usual coffee consumption isn’t much changed). Could be that my personal bouts with Covid have somewhat altered my physiology and I’m going to have to adjust to a new normal. Fortunately, I don’t have all that much down for the weekend other than putting in some tech time on Midsummer and a drive down to Montgomery to see Cabaret at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. (You may have noticed that I try to see every production of that show I can).
Midsummer is coming together, bit by bit. We have three weeks until opening. Tickets are now available on line for those in the area who want to see what I’ve done to Shakespeare. The cast are slowly coming off book, becoming more and more comfortable with the scenes and flow of the show and I’m starting to figure out how to solve some of the technical issues we have given that I’m trying to create environmental theater in a cafetorium with minimal budget and inadequate lighting and sound. If I’m reading the tea leaves right, the end result is going to be rather enjoyable – it won’t make anyone forget Peter Brook’s RSC production of 1968 but it should be entertaining and engage the audience. At least I hope so.
A good friend of mine called this morning from where she lives in Tennessee, a small town in the part of the state that hosted the Scopes Monkey Trial a century ago. Similar things are brewing there now. The mayor and vice-mayor are coming after the town librarian for daring to put up a display of LGBTQ themed books for Pride month. There are meetings planned to pack the library board so they can fire the offending librarian and purge the library. My friend and the other liberals in town are trying to figure out how to stop the writing on the wall. I gave what little advice I could, including a suggestion that they play a satirical look at book banning written nearly seventy years ago which highlights how ridiculous it is. I am, of course, referring to ‘Pick a Little Talk a Little’ from ‘The Music Man’. I would also remind everyone that Scopes lost the court case but if that battle was lost, truth eventually won the war. As Galileo muttered as he was led out of the court after his heresy trial ‘Nevertheless, it still goes round the sun’.
That’s what I think we all have to hang on to at the moment while we all watch a once great political party try to legislate science, literature, and human nature out of existence because it disagrees with either their theology or their short term political needs. Truth will out. It’s unchanging. It’s why cross examination works. It’s why the scientific method has allowed most of us to live lives that would be considered full of unspeakable luxuries to the royalty of a previous age. You can pledge allegiance to alternative facts but the true ones are going to get you in the end. That doesn’t mean that those who prefer a society built on half truths and platitudes can’t do a heck of a lot of damage in the meantime. Things are going to get more and more interesting as time goes on.
However, demography is destiny. Immigration to this country, which was basically shut down in 1923 for racist reasons opened up again in the 1970s. Who emigrates? Generally not the well off and comfortable. Why should they. It’s usually the industrious but without resources who are desperate to build a better life for their children. The Baby Boom is a very white generation because of the lack of immigration during its engendering. The generations that come after, especially the Millennials and Generation Z are filled with the children of newer Americans and are heavily minority and have a very different perspective on the American story. The Leave it To Beaver ideals of the past are collapsing rapidly as those generations age. The Baby Boom is very close to beginning their mass die off which is why the urgency to try and rig the game for certain classes to hold political power at the expense of everyone else before it becomes demographically impossible to accomplish this. Will it happen? Some will try. There may be violence but ultimately its a project doomed to fail as 40% of the Boom generation dies in the 2030s and another 40% in the 2040s.
The aging boom will turn to the health system en masse in a few years demanding that it save them from the inevitable. They’ve gotten everything they’ve wanted from society through the years because of their sheer numbers. This time it won’t work. First off, the conversion of the health care system from a public good to a private profit center has made it impossible for it to function as originally designed. The system done broke and I see nothing happening to try and repair it coming down the pike. Second, this idea that force of belief trumps the natural order of the world is going to prove psychologically traumatic. I see it routinely even in earlier generations. Someone comes in saying ‘I’m 80 and I can’t do the things I could do twenty years ago’. And the next sentence is always along the lines of ‘But I heard of this person who’s 90 and who can (insert choice of activity here) – why can’t I do that?’ There is this failure to recognize that you heard about this person because they are an extreme outlier on the edge of the bell curve. People tend to internalize the outlier they hear about as the norm and question themselves. The world doesn’t work that way.
When I do retire, I have a feeling I’ll need to completely back out of medicine and let all my licenses and certifications go. Otherwise, I’m going to be getting calls and texts from everyone wanting help to stave off normalcy and I just don’t have the energy to deal with that. Perhaps if I retire to Burkina Faso…
Life, The Universe, and Everything 