110833821
I just returned from seeing one of my medical specialists. I am in my 70s so I don’t wait to get sick before I visit a doctor. I try to keep a couple of steps ahead.
A typical visit is almost like some weird game. In the waiting room (which is one of the most appropriately named things there is in life), some of the anticipation almost gets the best of you. Think good thoughts. Don’t worry about your blood pressure or you will become your own self-fulfilling prophecy and up it surely will go.
I am called to the examining room where I wait for about 10 minutes or so until the doctor walks through the door. He examines the results of my blood test and I wait in silent anticipation. I need all of the numbers to align with good health. I need the numbers to be orderly like the rest of my life. If just one of the indicators is off, it could mean a whole new round of tests, an entire new concern until the next visit.
Young people can laugh at the desire of older Americans for their lives to be neat and orderly, but those whose lives are orderly are the ones who survive. If youths wants to understand their elders, they must understand our need for the core of our lives to make sense. Without order, life makes no sense to us.
We try hard to avoid chaos, which destroys orderliness. Chaos means uncertainty and my tolerance for uncertainty diminishes greatly as time goes by. We want very much to be in control of our own lives and chaos destroys control. What I like to call “The Chaos Factor” is very high in American life today. There is chaos everywhere we look in the political upheaval around the world, in our climate and in our politics. Every time we crave order there seems to be uncertainty and in the vernacular, we don’t do uncertainty well at all.
The president probably wonders why his Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare) is not all that popular, especially when most of it is not even in effect yet. The uncertainty surrounding the new health-care law is what frightens many people, even older Americans who are supposed to be affected the least by it. Even though most of us agree that our current medical system is abominable, we almost prefer abominable to uncertainty. Almost.
I find that I have trouble celebrating the leaked National Security Agency information Edward Snowden provided. You would think I would be concerned by the lack of oversight (just another word for control) over the government’s ability to gather information on us, and I am, but I also am concerned that individuals, such as Snowden, well-meaning or not (I’m not sure which in his case), can introduce a kind of chaos into our national lives. No one elected Snowden to make decisions on how best to protect our security. Whether he is right or wrong, it frightens me that he made this decision on his own. Is it my terrible need for tidiness that overwhelms me? The leaker is part of “The Chaos Factor.”
The president is conflicted on foreign policy. He is rumored to be fed up with the Afghan government and ready to pull our troops out ahead of schedule. Afghanistan is in chaos. It is impossible to tell our friends from our enemies or who really is in charge. Yet, the clamor rises for us to leap into the chaos of the civil war in Syria or to pick sides in last week’s military coup in Egypt.
Egypt is chaos personified. A first attempt at democracy failed because the Muslim Brotherhood, the democratically elected government, is essentially anti-democratic. Theocracy is not democracy. But there is chaos in the streets, and we wonder why the military just couldn’t wait a few years while the Muslim Brotherhood imploded from its own inept nastiness. And just how is it anyway that some of our best and brightest minds still believe that we can influence events in the Middle East to produce peaceful democracy?
Closer to home, I hate the chaos that is Harrisburg. There is no orderly approach to the schools, mass transit or jobs — only chaos and uncertainty. No real fiscal policy emanates from our terribly failed governor, Tom Corbett and his squabbling Republican legislature. Each year, we have to try and overcome the massive indifference from Harrisburg where the governing philosophy toward Philadelphia seems to derive from Marie Antoinette. The only certainty in Pennsylvania is uncertainty when it comes to funding the needs of Philadelphia.
There is a great danger at the heart of the need we, older Americans, have for orderly lives. It is that in our quest for quiet we can become unable to accept evolutionary social change. That in our natural preference for an orderly life we create bogeymen, insulate ourselves from the rest of the community and enmesh ourselves entirely in self-interest. Sometimes I find it even difficult to differentiate between progress and chaos. I wonder if I were this age in 1776 whether I would have just seen the patriots as rabble-rousers and the war for Independence as inconvenient?
And so it turns out that I spend a good deal of time seeking to figure out when the need for change outweighs The Chaos Factor.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
110833821
110833831
