I have bad news for everyone:
We won't last forever! With fall and Halloween just around the corner, maybe it's appropriate to mention that The End
tm could happen as soon as tomorrow. Or, if you are young enough or if technology moves fast enough, during your natural life. It could be the next century or the next millennium. But it's coming, as certain as a dino-killing asteroid on a collision course with planet Earth.
Odds are nearly astronomical that your personal End won't come from terrorism, or combat, or at the hands of an illegal immigrant rapist/drug dealer. That's just about all we hear about from politicians these days, but rarely do they address the real threats that affect the vast majority of each and every one of us. Those threats are well known and followed. Based on present stats, your odds of dying from cardiopulmonary disease, cancer or its complications, or complications from diabetes are way better than 50/50. Let's examine this a little bit more below, and end on a note of hope—or wishful thinking. You be the judge.
In 2009, about 40 people per 1000 died as a result of motor vehicle accidents. Accidents, cancer, heart disease, diabetes and emphysema—those are just a few of the biggies. There are a host of more rare and, in many cases, hard-to-pronounce conditions that can strike you dead in a moment or slowly eat you alive, mentally or physically, until all that remains is a helpless husk begging for Dr. Kevorkian with a series of eye blinks. A few new media writers have pointed out that moving your own furniture across a family room is a greater threat to life and limb than ISIS by two or three orders of magnitude.
We don't hear a lot from our political leaders or popular pundits about the looming threat posed by rogue furniture or too much laughing. It doesn't fit into the scare-the-shit out of us narrative that sells so many erectile dysfunction pills on cable news, and garners so many votes on election day. It's easy and too cute by half to blame the whole nation's screwed up sense of priorities on those same candidates and talking heads. When we do so, we do it with a tiny sense of embarrassment. We all know they grab for the fear lever buried in our psyche because it's an easy play. It works to some degree in moving us all, no matter which politically clumsy oaf—ahem—latches on to it.
Does it have to be this way? Are enough of us always going to be so damn gullible that we'll fall for this same scheme, generation after generation? Maybe. Then again, we have a particular generation called the Baby Boomers, a large group of people I have lagged behind all my life, watching them face varying degrees of hardship and opportunity. The boomers have had and continue to have a huge influence on U.S. culture. It's not an accident that the 1950s are remembered fondly as a time of innocence (the boomers were kids). Or that the 60s were a time of increasing awareness of social injustice and national imperfection culminating in an identity crisis. Or that the 70s were marked by hedonism and free love, while the 80s turned sharply conservative and oriented toward family values . . . you get the idea.
The classic demographic origin of the U.S. Baby Boomer generation
Baby Boomers are retiring in droves now. The leading edge is quickly closing in on 70 years-old. Seventy-year-olds tend to have some health issues, and 70-year-olds tend to worry about mortality. They also care about results, vote, and usually have a few bucks compared to their younger peers. So maybe, just maybe, the boomers will stop buying into the usual bullshit long enough to notice what is really killing off their friends and family.
Those culprits are cardiopulmonary and vascular disease, thousands of different kinds of cancer, diabetes, dementia, systemic organ failure, auto-immune issues, Parkinson's, and on and on. That's not even mentioning mostly non-lethal but devastating conditions like macular degeneration. Getting old isn't for wussies.
As the years begin to drift by like months, the baby Boomers and those of us close behind them are starting to realize that ... if only they had insisted the government embark on a comprehensive plan to research aging and its associated killers decades ago, when time was on their side, instead of lapping up boner pills and hair-loss remedies like starving birds, mouths agape, straining for their piece of momma-bird's still wriggling worm. The Grim Reaper is on their heels now. Time is an increasingly scarce and precious commodity.
The empirical truth is terrorism rates very low on our collective threat list. And yet, for many reading this, politicians have been cashing in on that fear for all or most of your entire adult lives. But as a species and certainly as a nation, we might finally have a shot at actually doing something about our more tragic and numerous biological flaws. If we can spend upwards of half a trillion dollars a year on terrorism, arguably to save a few dozen people, we could surely spend and equal or greater amount on the things that are thousands of times more likely to kill us or ruin what life we have left.
We might even have a shot of really extending life and staving off the slights of aging. A topic I plan to cover throughout the 2016 elections and beyond. We can accomplish these kinds of things and leave subsequent generations a real gift, the prize of a long and healthy life, perhaps centuries of life, and we can start in earnest now. If only the aging Baby Boomers get behind it.