Pop!

Am I increasingly aware of the human deaths around me now because I’m at more of a sensitive-to-these-things age of 70, or are there more deaths around me because my peers are mostly my age?

Chicken or the egg?

It’s much like popping corn. Silent at first, birth to 60 or so, and then the first pop among our peers. The starting gun. You think: “How can that be? Larry looked so good when we ran into him last week!” Some go earlier, bad driving, guns, drugs, or perhaps faulty construction to begin with, but in America, the average life expectancy is 78. Top of the bell curve. Most of us get to age 60 or so without much popping in our immediate age range, but of course the pace picks up. By the time we get to the middle of the timeline, all hell is breaking loose. The years between 74 and 84 are like a theatre popcorn machine right before the feature presentation. Sounds like the grand finale on the fourth of July.

By age 70, or even earlier, every time you feel a sharp pain or some physical anomaly, you think to yourself “So this is how it ends…” The same pain 30 years ago would barely register. You would pay no attention and just keep on running.

That’s what I tell myself to do.

Someone has to be last though, the final pop in any particular batch of corn. They’re the Kirk Douglas’s of the world, he’s 101. That person would be the only one left in their group left to hear it, and their hearing becomes disabled when they themselves release their own pop.

A tree falling in the forest with no one to hear.

When she was 94, my mother said: “Everyone I ever knew is dead.” More nostalgic than morbid.

Now I’m just starting to understand how that may feel when I’m also 94.

It will be even stranger if I pull a Kirk Douglas, and at 102 I’m the last silent pop among my peers, none of whom are alive to see…the last tree to fall in what used to be a huge forest.

Pop!

(Disclaimer: Carla will live to be 127. She’s too healthy, smart, and scrappy to succumb to normal human disease, but she’s 9 years younger than me and I don’t consider her to be in my age group.)

Religion, Nationalism, it’s all early childhood indoctrination and programming…

People worship over 2,500 different “gods” today. They can’t all be right so the logical assumption is that all of them are wrong.

Of course they are, they are all man made. It's fine to use them metaphorically to understand things which cannot be understood, but it's not OK to take them literally. That's exclusionary toward anyone who is not like you.

The reason people worship the particular god that they do is almost 100% a function of the family and the culture they were born into. I was born into a “Christian” family and dutifully marched into Sunday school singing “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war”, a rather odd song to align with the prince of peace, I thought. We marched in behind a boy carrying a pole with a cross on top and the figure of a man, dead and bleeding, nailed to it. Even then it seemed incongruous that my culture thought many other religious symbolisms to be barbaric.

We take on the culture, customs, and religion we are born into. Early childhood indoctrination locks us in. It’s the reason we wear the clothes we wear, eat the foods we eat, cheer for the sports we do, and parrot back the programming we learn in school. Things like the revisionist history of our own country. All about the bad “Indians” the European Americans victoriously battled to create our great country. It was one of the worst genocides in history. The blood is on our hands as we slap ourselves on the back for our wonderful deeds of land theft and murder.

It’s all early childhood indoctrination with a definite spin to favor and flatter the audience for which it is intended.

It is only when we are able to step back out of the forest and see the world as a whole, like an alien looking down from the moon, that we can make some progress. But when we are raised with religious prejudice and geographic nationalism, specific labels that divide and separate us, and we accept only those with similar gang sign, we are unable to move forward.

We are all more alike than different yet we spend most of our lives in denial of that fact, eagerly building walls that separate us from ourselves.