Politics and Betrayal: One Reason Why Older People Are Angry

I’ve recently joined a meditiation group of older men and women. Afterwards we sit around sharing about life in general, and for the first time I think I can now understand part of the current politics of anger, particularly among older men. The fact as I see it is that they have been lied to.

To put things more in context, they were raised to conform to a set of cultural expectations and assured that if they did so, they would be fulfilling themselves as men and would be happy.  Happy they definitely are not. In fact, they are bitter and feel cheated.

The reason is dismally obvious:  they conformed because they were assured that the world they were defending was the proper one and it would last forever. And then everything changed. They were no longer valued. No one applauded them anymore. No one came to them for advice.

In other words, they were cast adrift. The things that had given meaning to their lives were no longer viable. Women did not like pedestals and were serious competitors in the professional ranks. Their children adapted quickly to technologies that only left them confused and frustrated. America’s sense of special destiny to guide the rest of the world was turned on its ear when the rest of the world said no thank you and even accused the US of greed and self-interest.

Was this new America what they had given their lives to build and protect? Were these men to be the cast-off minority in a world that was rapidly passing them by?

Well, to some extent yes.  But so are we all over a certain age in a society mad about youth. Unfortunately, this is the way of the world and that the ancient Greek men were making some of the same complaints, particularly when the younger men did not feel as strongly about going to what they called old men’s wars.

 

It's tough when the old authorities fall away and no once considers anything you say to have any relevance. About the only thing you get recognition for is having reached your age--as if age were not also one of the enemies. "A dog's obeyed in office," Shakespeare said. And most of us over 65 are not in office unless we are hanging on grimly and defying anyone to say we are not doing our jobs. It's all so very tiring.

Which brings me back to the meditation group. I applaud the men who are coming to talk and to think. They are the ones who are still relevant, even though they don’t believe so.

I marvel at the conditioning, almost mind abuse, they have been subjected to:

Real men don’t cry and express emotion. If you cry people will think you a sissy or gay. When there is a war, you go because your father went and he says it will make a “man” of you. At the appropriate time, you will marry a suitable woman and have suitable children because that’s what’s expected. You are supposed to be all wise and the patriarch of your family. Your children’s troubles will be your failures. Pretty lonely. Only a control freak could love it. 

I could go on. Men reading this can do a better job than I of outlining what they were taught. But I do recognize the bitter betrayal of seeing a world that I thought I could control spinning away and evolving into something ugly like the pug-monkey-baby of the Super Bowl commercial.  What a temptation there is to want to destroy it.

Yet, here is the strange beauty, as Yeats put it, of men who are talking about finding peace inside themselves, of trying to move beyond judgment, and celebrating the aching beauty of a world that refuses to stay in place but still has given us all so much.