Nuance 19

I read in this weekend's Globe and Mail about how suicides have been going up among people in my age demographic. That's right, the Boomers. I don't really think of myself as a bonafide Boomer, rather, Generation Jones. We were born between 1955 and 1965, or so, and are more the forerunners for Generation X. Or to put it bluntly, the Boomers gave the world Woodstock. We gave you guys punk rock. I actually turned in my Boomer card while I was in my early twenties. I simply had ceased to like us. I was finding us to be self-indulgent, shallow, narcissistic and hedonistic, and not even in young children are these qualities to be proud of but to grow out of. I fear that not many Boomers have grown out of those traits, many of us remaining perennially stuck in the Terrible Twos, or the year of "It's MINE"!. I also noticed that I was at least a couple of years younger than everyone else. They all seemed set to stay young forever, and I didn't like this. I was only twenty-three, but already set to embrace ageing, perhaps because I was already starting to show early hair loss. I had a best friend, a radical lesbian feminist one year younger, with whom I was enjoying an ageing race. That's right, we both had a special fondness and respect for older people, maturity, and how much we had to learn from our elders, and we had a competition going to see who would pop the first wrinkle. Instead of getting in a panic about my thinning hair, I decided to accept it, and enjoy the challenge of maturing and becoming less selfish, which provided me a perfect lifeboat for escaping from this ship of fools. Now, forty years later, the Boomers have remained as pathetic as ever. Such a brood of narcissists. And all the usual life stages: getting married, buying a home (for the fortunate), having a kid, midlife crisis, menopause, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, the Boomers all embrace and write about and blog about and tweet about, and whine about, and brag about as though they are the first and only people in all the two hundred thousand years or so of our species' existence for whom any of those signature moments of life have ever happened, and as if none of those things were ever experienced by their own parents, grandparents, great grandparents, or great great grandparents. And now, our oldest cohorts are finding out that none of the cosmetic surgery, diet, cleanses, yoga, mindfulness, or frenzied power workouts, are going to do one blessed thing to delay the inevitable. So, how have many of us decided to deal with it? By throwing one prolonged meltdown tantrum against life itself. Instead of accepting and embracing, like mature and responsible adults, the inevitability of ageing and death, more and more of those ageing spoilt brats, are hopping off to Holland or Belgium or Switzerland for medically-assisted suicide (I refuse to call it by its current euphemism.). They're afraid of the pain and humiliation that often comes with ageing. They are terrified that some paid stranger will end up wiping their stinky bums for them, of losing eyesight, hearing, of losing their minds, of regressing to the same infantile state of absolute dependence on others that is the way that all of us start life. And of course this kind of decline is not going to be inevitable for everyone, but the fear of pain, vulnerability and dependency seems to be enough to get a lot of us flipping the bird at the God most of us no longer believe in (whom I not only believe in, but love and serve, myself), and declaring in their usual self-indulgent pomposity that if they are going to die, then they would rather do it themselves. This is no less, really, than the ultimate fallout of our prolonged rebellion against God, and it remains my position that it is not the lack of scientific evidence that turns people into atheists, but the absolute refusal to accept that we are subservient, subordinate and dependent upon an ultimately higher power. There is nothing wrong with this by the way. It is the order of the universe, of which we are but nano-members. What is really wrong with our generation is that we have failed to love, we have failed to accept the humility of our human existence, and we have decided, most of us, to accept Satan's offer of complete self-determination, no matter the huge cost to our souls. But given how deteriorated the state of the soul of your average Boomer, it ain't gonna be a huge trade-off. Pathetic, eh, Gentle Reader?