This from my old radio biz pal, and "FB" friend Claude Horvath.
"As I attempt to avoid Economist.com's inelegant pan-handling, here's a search string for use at Bing or Google that you may find helpful: site:Economist.com longevity "over 65 shades of grey" "to get the most out of longer lives, a new age category is needed".
My reply:
Well folks my age when I was little were already dead. So I suppose we're living longer. The quality of that life is what the health civil war is all about. One faction sez let them fucking die as nature intended. The other sez they should eat watch TV, and be well.
Back in the late 1960's when they were imagining what life would be like right now. They knew older folks would be around much longer. They supposed that Seniors would have evolved a culture for themselves like the youth culture which was in formation then. We never did. We remain unwanted or victims.
'Course they also thought prosperity would continue forever. They were unaware that there were forces at work to end it. Deliberately so. Get this. They imagined there'd now be a 25 hour work week a 90 day annual vacation colonies on the moon, and possibly Mars. Mind you we could have done all that, but the usual obstacles of greed power lust class contempt rage, and rather gross stupidly got in the way. Those "Futurist's back then thought. I mean actually thought we'd have got past all that traditional noise that by now.
The Future is just not what it used to be.
1 comment:
So true - the future is over. Would that it were what it once was.
I don't think that space colonies on Mars stuff was ever going to happen. Where'd we get the fuel for that? We already blew it out our tailpipes just driving to Walmart and the drive-in, and motor vacations to Disneyland.
But that Scandinavian-style socialism stuff - yeah, absolutely, we coulda done it. The wealth was there. If we'd moved away from the global domination empire game and gross consumerism and devoted our resources to conservation and socialism lite, we'd be OK. What's more, this would be a better world, more prosperous and just.
The prob? First, the Rockefellers and their ilk never lost control of the country, not for a moment. Second, our countrymen were stupid enough to vote for Reagan, twice. So capitalism won. 25 hour work week? Instead, we have people getting heart attacks on 60 and 80 hour work weeks, and millions more without a job. Real estate agents grow rich while people go homeless. We have ATMs instead of jobs for bank tellers, answering systems instead of jobs for receptionists, automated checkout instead of supermarket clerk jobs, Uber instead of employment for taxi drivers, and soon we'll have driverless vehicles instead of employment for truckers. Isn't automation wonderful? We just love it when corporate robots fuck us.
We're also depleting all the resources in the world while human population explodes. Instead of conserving energy while building out good public transit and renewable energy infrastructure, we've built a billion gas hog SUVs and inflated our homes to energy-squandering McMansions. We all believe in conservation, as long as somebody else does it, not us. As a consequence, not only the United States but the entire global industrial civilization is going down, because of course all the up-and-coming nations want to imitate our awful example, accelerating the crisis.
So we can forget about extending life expectancy. Instead, the reverse is happening. In the USA certain demographics are dying sooner, not later. This is a trend, not a blip; it will spread to other demographics. Thanks to the insane war we're helping the Saudis wage in Yemen, there are now 300,000 cases of cholera in that nation. What are the odds it'll wind up over here? Nah, that could *never* happen. Plus our medical system is breaking down under the strain of the greed of insurance companies.
Why has this happened? Ray Jason, the sea gypsy philosopher, would say it's the Malignant Overlords - his phrase for the capitalist ruling class - and I guess there's considerable truth in that. But I think it may be too charitable. We could have stopped this had we so chosen. To put it absolutely bluntly, we Americans as a people - WE ARE STUPID. Plus capitalism is dog poop, pleasing only to sociopaths and those who love Walmart and think poop-on-a-stick is pretty fucking delicious.
So at this point civilization is a salvage job. In a century or two, three at most, human population will be a tenth or a twentieth what it now is. This is absolutely in keeping with historical precedent, and also that of natural history. It's time to start making our time capsules to conserve whatever we want to last through a long dark age.
Z
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