Of all the songs on Jason Isbell’s breakout 2013 album Southeastern, it’s Relatively Easy that holds up best.
“You should know, compared to people on a global scale, our kind has had it relatively easy.” But people are still unsettled. A brother is on a church kick, “just another form of dope sick.” A man’s wife takes his kids away and he takes Klonopin, “enough to kill a man of twice his size.” The narrator tore up his loft and is now on parole, alone.
Everyone wants more, and prosperity doesn’t change it. We all think it was better back then, that it’s all terrible and about to get worse.
It isn’t. The past wasn’t good. We live longer than ever if we’re not getting ourselves shot, overdosing on drugs, or refusing vaccines. Middle class Americans are richer than anyone in the history of the world, thanks to technology and the creativity economy. We have nothing to complain about.
Yet most of us would rather punch down. We’re more afraid of a poor man catching a break than a rich man catching a billion of them. This is especially true among my fellow baby boomers, now aged 58-75, the pig in the python that refuses to digest. Over 70 million strong, still, most of us incredibly wealthy, compared to people anywhere else, nearly all of us voting, and marching America off a cliff, into the past.
You want to reject science, reject history, reject anything but your absolutist religion? You think they got it easy in Iran? You think they had it better in the 1950s? They don’t. They didn’t. The lives of our parents were filled with strife, with depression and war. They had real stuff to be afraid of. We don’t, especially since we’ll likely be off the planet before the bill for ruining it comes due.
Look back. Look back to any generation in American history. They all had it harder. More infants and children died younger than you can even imagine. Old age meant poverty, not cruising. American life expectancy in 1900 was about 47. Today we call that middle age. Tom Brady is 43.
If I were an African, I should be dead by now. A newborn in Asia shouldn’t expect to live much longer than I have already. I'm 66. Yet I’m expecting another 17 years or so of good health. That’s what the statistics say.
But older Americans don’t believe in statistics anymore. We’re high on our own supply of ignorance. History says that people who get that way are always overthrown by smarter, hungrier people. Like our own kids. If they just voted, in numbers equal to our own, they could make a true revolution.
As it is, their future is looking as dim as our past.
