Glue Factory
I come to you, my readers, in my 100th piece for the West Texas County Courier Newspaper, a broken man. Life has not been what I or many of us envisioned for ourselves, in this age of medical miracles, information super highways, quick-draw plastic, and the burning of Stars and Stripes and Mom’s apple pie. As unbridled imagination seeks to establish a beachhead and the complexions of kindergartens become an experience in the color spectrum, niches become harder than ever to carve in the human collectivity. With laptops plugged into walls, earphones into any orifice that will take them, and cellular phones into our privacy, something as simple as reading a good book on a lazy Sunday afternoon becomes tantamount to SAT calisthenics for disenfranchised youths bred on a healthy diet of white noise versus productive brain waves. Whoever said the meek will inherit the earth? That primacy will rest with the unqualified of stellar résumé legions of under-thirty stamp, whose English is heavily accented, intelligible only in the darkest recesses of remedial ESL classrooms, and written correctly only to the rattle, hum, and glow of spellcheck and Google Search. And all the while Baby Boomers are looked upon with disdain, called “old” and “bald,” and readied for 21st century furnaces, “soylent green,” or the glue factory.
Nothing new. It has always been that way, you say. Well, I say, “Enough!” Sometime, someone, somewhere must draw a line in the sand, and with the world currently on a downward rollercoaster spiral toward Sodom and Gomorrah, perhaps it is time to roll out the old and reign in the new. Unrealistic, you protest. Well, so was $5.00 a gallon gasoline several years ago. And while a cure for cancer goes the way of the horse and buggy, we continue to be held hostage by a generation whose only claim to fame is a resting on forefathers’ laurels and a relentless conviction that “honor student” bumper stickers are a true sign of worth and gauge of future success. Bah, humbug! My dog is smarter than your honor student! Then, again, maybe the 78 million Baby Boomers, born between 1945 and 1964, don’t have what it takes to compete with the current trade school or college-age population, as they are prepared for entry onto or continued longevity on U.S. employment scrolls.
God help us, and God help this country of ours! It is a sad commentary on life and times when chronological age is equated more with a readiness for the glue factory, than with experience to not only be passed on to others but also to increase productivity in the workplace. While 50- and 60-year-olds continue to be discarded from the job market, in favor of twenty- or thirty-somethings whose nimble fingers make laptops, iPods, iPads, smart phones, and every imaginable (and, most often, totally useless) electronic gadget dance, literacy, math, and science skills, and the ability to read and write clearly and coherently, continue to be outsourced to China, India, and Pakistan. America, shame on you! The worth of a nation is not measured by how it values the new, but by how it treasures the old. The Japanese would most certainly attest to that assertion, while at the same time having done away with the traditions and inner nobility of the Samurai. The American Indian admonishment should be chiseled in the stone of the Washington Monument, that “That which you take will always be taken from you.” Fast forward to twenty or thirty years from now, and I’ll be gone, leaving the so-called “young and able” to write the follow-up piece, in God only knows what language and with how much incorrect syntax.
When young and playing fast-pitch on a brick wall with only enough money in the pocket for a soda pop, one longs for the day when adulthood brings riches and the American Dream. That shiny red sports car that zooms by is not seen as an object of envy to be coveted, but rather a goal to be reached with hard work at the coming of age. No longer true today, however, as financial solvency walks a tightrope between soup kitchen and fast-food restaurant, as prescription medications are cut in half by the sick and indigent to make them go farther, as families must decide between winter heating oil and sending junior to college, and as a missed paycheck marks the beginning of the yellow brick road to invasion of privacy by collection agencies, as the number of unemployed workers 55 and over continues to swell to 2.2 million and beyond. That is triple the 2005 figure, with half the vagrants, unemployed, homeless, jobless, migrants, old bags, welfare cons, hand-out abusers, or whatever else one chooses to call the innocent out of work for more than six months. All the while, establishment big-wigs tell the rest, “You should be grateful to have a job in these times.” Translation: be miserable, earn a minimum wage not commensurate with your educational level, pay off those expensive student and high interest credit card loans, and with the change in your pocket be glad you’re alive. After all, you brought this on yourselves.
Is “recareering” the answer for laid off auto workers, engineers, bankers, builders, and doctors, like myself? Not in a long shot, especially in the current economic climate of heartless foreclosures, devastating tsunamis, readily available iodine pills to forestall the immediate effects of fallout particles on the thyroid while placing the subsequent leukemias twenty years down the road on the backburner, and a bloated and ravenous military fighting losing battles on three fronts in order to keep its uneducated masses gainfully employed and out of sight, out of mind of job recruiters and Ivy League-trained economists in a sputtering civilian job market. The latter echoes the “Let’s make war, not love” mentality that has made American great in times of economic downturn.
In 1905, world-renowned physician William Osler stated in no uncertain terms that ages 25-40 were the golden years of productivity, with workers aged 60 and above being basically useless. The fight for survival, lack of food, and scarce resources made Darwinian logic a mantra during the subsequent Great Depression, with older Americans refusing to retire and causing great unemployment among younger workers. After that, it became all too evident that the only way to get old people to stop working was to pay them enough to stop working. Now, however, you cannot either pay them enough to stop working or work them enough to start paying. The “glue” will just continue to flow.
The history lesson and venting are over. I guess I’ll just make my way down to the factory.
© 2011, Albert M. Balesh, M.D. All rights reserved.
posted by Dr. Al at
3/30/2011 02:56:00 PM
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