A Peak Under the Covers
Sometimes I jot down a title that grabs me and then I go back later to write the story that came to mind for which the title was intended. Every once in a while, I get caught up with life and I forget to write the story and the thought evaporates, leaving the title staring me in the face with no idea what I wanted to write about. And then there are titles like this one that can go off in so many different directions that it makes no sense to discard it. I am getting peaks under so many covers these days that I am beginning to wonder why.
I am finding my life so very changed by so very many events lately that I feel as though I am living another and very different life than the life I have lived for sixty-six years. The most obvious and impactful issue of consequence is the Coronavirus Pandemic. It has not only changed the way we spend our days and conduct both our business and our social interaction, but in so doing, it is also changing the more intimate aspects of our lives by intensifying them. I suspect that given the greatly elevated disparity of views in the world today, most notably the political views of extreme libertarianism versus social consciousness and collectivism, we have all changed the manner in which we think about the world and how we respond to the controversies of the moment. The “moment” we are in is, indeed, most momentous because it goes to the heart of the fundamental political differences that seem to be defining us one and all. The countdown we are reminded of daily (21 days until the election as of this morning) is a referendum in this country of almost everything that is changing our lives. It is, by definition, that fundamental. The biggest election issue overall is the handling of the Coronavirus Pandemic both medically and politically. The trite issue of mask-wearing and the politics thereof has become a signal that we are all literally wearing on our faces as though we had labels printed on our foreheads. Now we are being parsed, even by responsible authorities like public health workers as being in the younger or older cohorts of potential victims of the virus. The views of how best to conduct public policy have shifted dramatically just this year due to the beast. Young should go on living their lives and old should shelter-in-place and do their best to hide and protect themselves. What could be a bigger change than that?
I spent over ten years studying, teaching and writing about retirement. My focus was more economic than societal though the two are inextricably linked. In the book I wrote on the subject, I tried to make it more readable by personalizing the stories and lessons to be learned by using familial examples and how they were affected by the wave of the process. That seems now far more prescient than I have a right to claim because the societal impacts of aging and the funding of that aging has become the species-threatening event I portended, but not for the exact reasons I had anticipated. I thought that the have versus the have-nots as defined by pension funding or the burdens of unfunded pension liabilities were the primary driver for the defining event. But now it seems to be more the societal disparities being created are more devastating than the pure economics. We see this starkly every day as the stock market roars forward (certainly with plenty of “toing and froing”, but still advancing) and yet more people are slipping into poverty and despair from the fragility of their existence as exposed by the Pandemic’s social and economic impact. Nowhere is this becoming more the case than in the aged who either reside in Uber-vulnerable assisted living facilities or are closer than ever to the specter of age-related economic devastation.
The species of man is being forced to choose between providing for its young or abandoning its old. I thought this was a pension issue on the horizon, but the medical realities have jumped in front of this oncoming train and now devour our nightmares. We no longer have to wait for Social Security to run out of money to have a problem, Medicare will win that race off the cliff and the Affordable Care Act will outpace them both by exploding in our faces if the Republicans have anything to say about it. In fact, the Republicans are likely to go down in history (as though there will be any victors in the debacle to even bother to record history) as having been the evil geniuses who spent years not only gerrymandering the American voting process to head-off the demographic realities of racial dilution and their own demise, but also recognizing the vulnerability of the judicial branch to manipulation to overturn the legislative will of the people in everything from health (Affordable Care Act) to life itself (abortion).
The best evidence that Republicans can offer in defense of this promotion of youth is that the share of wealth held by millennials in the U.S. has shrunk to 4.6% where us Baby Boomers enjoyed 21% of the wealth in our generational ascendancy. But funny thing, the ones forcing this issue are the very ones who hold all that wealth (myself included) while the vast majority of the aging Baby Boom generation are right now forced to price out their dog food dining preferences while they stay at home hoping to escape the virus and FaceTime their grandkids while they await their next social security check with baited breath and wonder where their next medical co-pay will come from. Their savings now generate $220 in interest income from $100,000 hard-saved money, so no amount of squirreling away nuts make that work to fill their financial gaps. It remains the Palm Beach crowd whose lives seem to mater and are least impacted by COVID, as evidenced by our president’s “Better-than ever” COVID recovery.
What exactly is under the covers right now? Well, as it turns out it wasn’t under the covers that I glimpsed in writing this piece, but under the bed where the monsters live. And if that COVID societal change peak wasn’t enough to scare me, I just read that Exxon Mobil, as discovered by leaked internal documents worthy of a 20-20 show, projects a 17% rise in Carbon Dioxide emissions by 2025 as they barrel (pun intended) forward toward energy self-sufficiency while BP and Royal Dutch Shell increasingly embrace renewables and seek every opportunity to curb their emissions. The best news to report this morning is that we may not have to worry about outliving the COVID beast since the world isn’t looking able to address the other beast under the bed that is consuming our ozone layer.