A bad time to be aging

    Here's something I don't like about being in my late sixties and, for a number of reasons I won't bore you with, unlikely to live beyond my mid seventies, if that:

   America, and much of the world, is on a trajectory that I consider bad. It's true of the climate, too. There are many good things ahead, chiefly, in my selfish view, in the field of medicine, but the bad things will be bad. They won't happen all at once
in America—we're too used to being a liberal democracy to have rapid change—but they are creeping in now and that will continue. 

   What that rate of change means is that the reversal of it will also take time. It will be done by compromise. Many these days wait for a huge moment that will make everything turn abruptly, but that won't happen. It can't. The current American social climate has been decades in the making, and it will take at least as long to go back to what it was. It took Russia seventy years to go from being the USSR back to Russia, and the changes that came haven't fared well.

   I will go out on a low note. It was the opposite for my parents, who both died in late 2011. They were living in a time that some thought was post racial, and generally filled with hope. The sitting president's campaign slogan had been Yes we can! and many believed that.