We’re “retiring” (read firing) people at the age of 55, and look at the consequences. Married couples having lunch–with each other. Mall-walking gridlock. White-collar college graduates who liked Ike, hugging each other in support groups in church basements-the only embraces these days safe from sexual-harassment charges. And then there are frivolous matters like widening permanent unemployment, decreasing living standards and an increasing sense of worthlessness.
Now they want us to endure 85 years of retirement? Consume 75 years of social security and Medicare? Spend 91 years of being an unwanted television viewer? (Advertisers only need you from 18 to 49.) Waiting for our 115-year-old children to phone?
I chained a fresh cigarette off the old one and thought hard about the coming backlog on Willard Scott. I foresaw the glut in beaded wallets and homemade potholders. The shuffleboard Super Bowl. The winner of “The Ms. Aluminum Walker Pageant.” I saw Jack Palance featured on the Huggies box. I saw-Florida!!
I inhaled deeply. I knew there was no way to stop it. Me-Americans are determined to live as long as they can without regard to the consequences. These Nautilus narcissists and broccoli-eating egotists outnumber us, burning off and swallowing down whole their grandchildren’s earnings, while the anti-tobacco Savanarolas swell their gymdandy chests and suck up the oxygen as though we had it to spare in this chain-saw season of diminishing rain forests.
I had two cigarettes going at once. And wondered why 90 percent of Americans tell their pollsters that they believe in God and heaven and still you have to drag them kicking and screaming, tubes dangling, to the Elysian elevator ascending to eternal bliss. Do they think they really deserve the down button? Have they stopped believing in anything at all but their individual self-centered lives?
I crumpled the empty pack in my fist. Where does it go in the separated garbage? Is it paper? Plastic? It sets off metal detectors in airports.
OK, OK. I know smoking is bad for you. It hurts your social life (actually, anti-smoking zealotry has spared me the company of a lot of people I wasn’t too fond of seeing in the first place) and your health. I never smoke around pregnant women or little kids.
I know smoking is likely to kill me, although, living in New York City, I haven’t entirely given up on falling masonry, a tobaccoless oldster’s runaway car hurtling onto the sidewalk or getting gunned down by a crackoid with an Uzi in his frenzied but un-nicotine-stained hands.
Yes, yes. I know. Four hundred fifty thousand Americans die every year from smoke-related illness. That’s what they tell me, and I believe what they say. They tell me also that the treatment of these illnesses costs billions of dollars a year. But have they looked ahead? Have they thought about what these 450,000 will die of if not smoking? Drowning by drooling? Terminal boredom from public-television fund-raising drives? Have they calculated the cost to keep oldsters warehoused in nursing homes?
We are at the point now of not being able to pay for 65s and over. Social security and Medicare/Medicaid consume about 34 percent of the federal budget, or $510 billion annually. Look ahead 20 years: 70-plus million baby boomers on social security and Medicare, 10 million of them smoke-enders who should have been dead. (You always get your party crashers.) These two entitlements plus interest on the national debt-currently some $300 billion or 21 percent of the budget-will absorb all our resources.
There will be generational war, and ethics will have to be redefined. Euthanasia will be added to the national anthem: “Oh say can you see anyone 83. . . " and the Pledge of Allegiance: “One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all and exit visas for oldies.”
Threescore and ten: When social security was initiated in the 1930s, the life expectancy of the American male was 63. No one foresaw that millions of Americans would live to be 80, 90 or 140. Eighty or 90 got you a blurred photo and four paragraphs in the local newspaper. If you were not already dead, you were supposed to retire at 65, follow the Biblical model of Threescore and Ten and croak around 70, with some interim dignity, and get off stage and off the public weal. Retirees get back what they paid into social security in a few years. Every month, every year of life expectancy added since then is costing the nation billions of dollars it does not have. The same with Medicare. We know the bulk of our exploding medical costs is being spent on people over 65. Put a sharpened pencil to 140 and see what you get.
I was into a second pack now and all the guilts were lifting. I was feeling pretty all right about still sustaining the economy of North Carolina, and I was basking in my prosocial role of working on dying according to Ecclesiastes’ writ and grace: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die. . .”
Sure, if I could keep a good life going like this, for everybody-and mine is-I’d take 140 years of it. I’m as selfish as the next. But only if we reorganize society so that old people are allowed to count and to contribute, not as today, simply to be ignored and then, in helplessness, petulance, eat up resources beyond their usefulness. Until that happens, I will continue to work on my timing–knowing when to get off.
This is good, getting something off your chest. Even if it is catarrh. OK, that’s it. I have to go now. Not to die! Out for cigarettes! Anybody need a light?
