Among the Survivors
My Congregationalist soldier-grandfather never told me about the mustard gas attack he survived in World War I. He wouldn't talk about it. My Catholic grandmother, from France, never liked this country. She married the colonel; now, there's a story. I lived with her other daughter for a while, too, my aunt. She was Southern Baptist, and career military, tough and cynical and funny. She didn't have to tell me when she thought I was full of it. Her look said it all. I played bass or guitar at her church meetings a few times, undoubtedly the only Bar Mitzvah'd kid in town who knew the chords to "Victory in Jesus."
Gone, now, all of them. But, while they lasted, these connections transformed us from an "only" into a "we." They still do, in memory.
My first grandchild was named for my mother's brother who, as it turns out, was a Communist in his college days. He was a photographer, an artist, a writer, a sensitive young man with a bright future. Then he went off to World War II and died in a plane crash. He did because corporate profiteers cut corners when they built the bomber he died in. He remained a living presence to us, although he died in 1944. But to the corporation that built his airplane he was only a pilot, only a casualty, only another dead Army captain with a grieving family back home.
His namesake is four years old now, with a one-year-old little brother. I can't visit them right now because it's too dangerous. They called me the other day after dinner, just because they felt like it. We could see each other as well as talk, thanks to public investment in new technologies, but the older boy kept running around with the phone. It felt like I was watching The Blair Witch Project.
No big deal. We were just saying hello.
City of Lost Children
Children and the old: When the web of generations is torn, both ends are lost.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Health came to the United States in 2018 and concluded that more than 600,000 children had died needlessly over the last 50 years. As I wrote at the time, that's the population of an entire mid-sized city; a city of lost children.
The report concluded that a child born in the U.S. is 76 percent more likely to die before reaching adulthood than one born elsewhere in the developed world (although Boris Johnson and his party are working hard to catch up).
But the Lost City isn't just for children. When a young woman with a neurological disorder is dismissed as "moody" or "difficult," she's an "only." When a brave young man like Steve Way must fight an insurance corporation for the right to keep breathing and stay alive, this passionate and funny advocate becomes an "only."
(Steve, by the way, is a neoliberal success story, because he has private-sector insurance. The only problem is that his insurance company may kill him.)
Generational Dehumanization
As for the older residents of our decaying city, here I find myself in an unfamiliar position. For once, I'm not fighting just for others, but for myself. And I'm taking note of the daily reminders that I am not fully human to some people including some younger people, most neoliberals, and a certain percentage of supposedly "woke" Democrats.
Part of me wants to say: Remember me to them when I'm gone.
Our more responsible leaders are telling people over 65 to "self-isolate." That's good advice. Unfortunately, millions live in killing isolation already. Nursing homes are telling family and friends that visiting hours are canceled for the foreseeable future. There is a lot of pain in that, as necessary as it is.
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