Suicide in Mid-Life

Buried deep in the New York Time's article is the possible cause:

At the moment, the prime suspect is the skyrocketing use — and abuse — of prescription drugs. During the same five-year period included in the study, there was a staggering increase in the total number of drug overdoses, both intentional and accidental, like the one that recently killed the 28-year-old actor Heath Ledger. Illicit drugs also increase risky behaviors, C.D.C. officials point out, noting that users’ rates of suicide can be 15 to 25 times as great as the general population.

This seems plausible to me. There really isn't any understanding of how the meds affect people going on and off of them and mixing them. And then there is the fact that the Boomers may have the most difficult time with aging of any generation.

Boomers Bust?

Megan McCardle writes the best article I've read about the implications of the Baby Boom generation on America. A snippet:

One of the greatest challenges for the country will be creating good jobs for seniors, ideally ones closer to where they built their skills and knowledge than the aisles of Staples or Home Depot—ones in which they’ll be the most productive. There’s no national bureau that can bring about this change. It must emerge organically, from companies learning to accommodate their older workers on the one hand, and finding creative ways to mask or reduce the emotional impact of pay cuts on the other. And from changed expectations on the part of 60-somethings about career paths and hierarchy.

Until that happens—and even once it does—our politics are likely to be contentious, because to many people, spanning several generations, it may feel as if there’s not enough money to go around. And indeed there’s no getting around these facts: in 1945, the year before the Baby Boomers began entering the world, each retiree in America was supported by 42 workers. Now each retiree is supported by three. When the Boomers are fully retired, each of them will be supported by just two.

Read the whole thing.

H/T Instapundit

Generational Generalizations

Is the Greatest Generation, so-called, that great? Are the Baby Boomers vapid jingoists intent on self-actualization through plastic surgery? Are the Xers the forgotten generation, smashed between the Gen Y and Boomer vice?

Well, I know quite a few of the Greatest Generation who ain't so great. And I know some spectacular Gen Y-ers. We should use caution when generalizing too much, I think.

The Bad Old Days

I meant to point you guys to this yesterday. There are some people who reminisce and hope to change public policy around to relive the glory days. James Lileks notes:

Progress is a herky-jerky march, and it’s not always clear which way we’re heading. I tend to believe it all could be much, much worse, and I still have faith in the future, mostly because I am loath to abandon Youthful Optimism and settle into gouty disapproval. I do know that things are certainly cooler than ever. Things are just cool. When I first started doing the MYS concerts, I was writing on an iMac, calling up the baby internet on a 640X480 screen; last night I was looking over my script backstage, and I realized that I was introducing an opera about which I knew nothing. So I called up wikipedia on the iPhone, got some details a minute before I was supposed to go on stage, and added them to the remarks. And it felt cool.

Anyway. If there’s one conviction that afflicts the keenest mind as it ages, it’s the belief that Things Were Better Then, and Things Are Horrible Now, usually because no one has learned the lessons of your own generation and insisted on experiencing the world for themselves. (Frank Rich provided a neat example of this a few days ago, when he diagnosed Americans as “clinically depressed” and unable to capture the glories of his demographic, which Took It To the Streets, Man. And blew up a few buildings while they were at it, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking into a farmer’s coop, stealing his chickens, setting fire to the coop and running off with the eggs, all of which you later misplaced because you were high.)

I’m so used to being lectured by sour Boomers I’ve come to think of them all as the Gratingest Generation, but it was nice to see Keillor write about how things were worse, then.

Read the whole thing.

Boomer Badness: "Growing Old With A Vengeance"

P.J. O'Rourke:

And that's the good news. Beggaring government is the least of the damage that we baby boomers intend to inflict over the next 30 or 40 years. What we're really up to is something more diabolical. Our generation is going to do what our generation has always done best. We're going to shape the American social fabric to our will and make the entire nation conform to our ideals, judgments, and tastes. It will be like the Clinton administration but much, much worse. (An interesting little irony since in '08 we're probably going to get a Clinton administration that's much, much worse.)

We baby boomers are growing old--but growing old with a vengeance. Our hands may be palsied and arthritic, but we hold America's fate in them. And America's fate can be summed up in one word: Youthanasia.

Baby Boomers. Fear them.

Old Dudes As Fathers

New York Times writer Thomas Vinciguerra revisits the families where the man entered fatherhood in his 60s and 70s: He's Not My Grandpa, He's My Dad. Guess what? Some of the fathers are dead. Guess what? Other of the fathers are sick. Guess what? The surviving mom have second thoughts. Guess what? The kids miss their dads.

Lori Cohen Ransohoff also has regrets. She was married to Dr. Joseph Ransohoff, a neurosurgeon 41 years her senior. When he died in 2001, their children — Jake, then 11, and Jade, 5 — were hit hard.

“I don’t ever really remember preparing the kids,” Mrs. Ransohoff said. “He was so healthy I just took it for granted. I never thought that far ahead. Looking back, I realize that was foolish. Now I tell my daughter, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t marry an older man.’ ”

It's selfish. It's the final indulgence in a life full of indulgences. There will be more of it as the Boomers who opted out of procreation decide at 70 to find out what experience man they missed.

Anchoress Posts My Favorite Blog Title of 2007

Hey, four days is an eternity in blogland. The headline is: Civic Immaturity is the New Sophistication. This still has me laughing. Maturity, is like, so 1940s. And she references another essay by Dick Meyers with this:

Meyer, watching the funeral of President Gerald R. Ford, have something of an epiphany: politics has changed. It’s not optimistic and hopeful anymore, it’s rather nihilistic (everything is bad) and the campaigns never wane.

Continuing....Either everyone is lying their asses off, or no one is. Or one side is…but which side, friend? The side you want to believe the worst in? That won’t do. That’s not enough to go on. But “us good, them bad” does appear to be the height of political sophistication for most of the country, these days.

True, that. See, I'm using very sophisticated and immature post-modernist inner-city slang. Like me, she blames the Boomers and why not? They deserve it (I say this as a Gen Xer eagerly anticipating meeting or exceeding every Boomer need for the next, oh, million years--the Boomers won't die, after all. They are invincible.):

2) Baby Boomers are perpetual adolescents. Their mindset is still predominant in the public arena, and their mindset is…approximately 14 years old. So is their politics. Boomers are also the first generation raised to believe every damn thing they see on television, and perhaps because television and boomers rather “grew up” together, they are intensely loyal to the thing, which means they are intensely into pop culture, and incredibly easy to sway via media. My grandmother used to say “it’s in the paper!” to express that a thing must be true. To the boomers who are currently holding sway everywhere, if Tim Russert is saying it, if Jon Steward is deadpanning it, if Steven Colbert is satirizing it…it must be true.

Therefore, if all we ever hear on the news is how dreadful everything is (and props to Meyer for remembering what an utter disaster was Carter’s presidency, and I say that having voted for Carter) and if boomers are predisposed to believe the news…well…in the public perception, everything really is going to hell in a handbasket, even if inflation is low, unemployment is incredibly low, the markets are up, minority college enrollments are up, housing starts are up, numbers of the black middle class are increasing, the deficit is going down and oh, yeah, we haven’t been attacked on our soil since 9/11. We’re told it’s all bad. Many believe it.

And when those folks were told - all through the 1990’s, when AlQaeda was attacking our interests every 18 months and the market was running on “irrational exuberance” - that everything was better than it had ever been at any time before in the history of the country, well…they believed that, too.

So, dear Anchoress, am I to take home the message that this cynical state of political affairs will not cease until the Boomers wane from power? Shrinkwrapped (in too many posts to count so I'm linking to all of them about Boomers) has suggested that the world will not be a better place until the last Boomer dies--kinda like the generation that died off wandering for forty years in the wilderness before Israel entered the Promised Land. Now that's a nihilistic notion. Or is it optimistic?

And are the Boomers so nihilistic and narcissistic that they will participate in the destruction of the Western world just so there is nothing literally left after they're gone? (Figuratively there will be nothing left because, well, they are everything and when everything is gone, nothing is left, right?) And does their nihilism and narcissism pervade the group EST so completely that this belief destroys everything: You know, if I can't live forever and save the earth, then no one can.

What will become of us when the Boomers no longer define the argument? At their social, political, career, and general influence apex, Boomers run the shows--MSM, Government, Business, etc. They are crafting policy to meet their needs. They are shaping the nation's narrative to reflect their frightened inward narrative: I'm gonna die! We're gonna die!

From deifying Global Warming as the existential threat, to ignoring real existential threats like chronic disease and terrorists toting nuclear bombs, the Boomers create reality for us all.

As for the cure to this disease? Time. Time, heals all. If the Boomers don't kill us first. I'm just joking. Sheesh! It's not that bad. These are just rantings of an impotent member of the smallest generation.
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