I would like to invite any of you who live here locally, to my presentation at the La Veta Public Library this Thursday at 2PM. My theme is “What’s it like to move here?” We can discuss the ins and outs of moving to rural Colorado, how passive solar works, and anything else that comes up!
After our 2016 election, I became determined to understand why Americans found a billionaire, real estate mogul, reality show candidate so attractive as our next president. This did not compute for me. What about this 70-year-old, obviously sexist and racist candidate spoke to so many Americans? In the midst of listening to the popular music of the 1960s this week I finally got it. This music reminded me of what was happening in our country in the mid- to late 1960s, something I hadn’t thought about in years.
First of all, let me explain what a cohort study is. Wikipedia defines it as:
“A cohort study is a particular form of longitudinal study that samples a cohort(a group of people who share a defining characteristic, typically those who experienced a common event in a selected period)…”
My best example is a study I learned about when I was pursuing a Master’s degree in history. It theorized and then proved that many of the children from Germany in WWI lost their fathers and consequently found themselves seeking a strong, authoritarian father figure as they grew up. This they found in Adolf Hitler. They found meaning and purpose in the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party.
Back to the Trump cohort. I began to think about the recent history of our country, and the revolution we experienced in the 60s, a real revolt against the Vietnam War, racist and sexist attitudes, and powerful men who thought they could tell us what to do without our permission. Note the impeachment of Richard Nixon who resigned in 1974.
“Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War began with demonstrations in 1964 against the escalating role of the U.S. military in the Vietnam War and grew into a broad social movement over the ensuing several years. This movement informed and helped shape the vigorous and polarizing debate, primarily in the United States, during the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s on how to end the war. By 1967, according to Gallup Polls, an increasing majority of Americans considered U.S. military involvement in Vietnam to be a mistake.”
I began to see how the 1960s peace movement tended to include educated college students and their elders: “Opposition grew with participation by the African-American civil rights, women’s liberation, and Chicano movements, and sectors of organized labor. Additional involvement came from many other groups, including educators, clergy, academics, journalists, lawyers, physicians, and war veterans.” Source: Wikipedia
This revolution left out most poor and uneducated Americans who didn’t go to college or revolt. The men were sent to Vietnam. Trump was also apparently left out. He attended the New York Military Academy and the Wharton School during the Vietnam War protests.
“After graduating from college in the spring of 1968, Trump was eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam. Instead he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels. This diagnosis resulted in a coveted 1-Y medical deferment that fall, exempting him from military service as the United States was undertaking huge troop deployments to Southeast Asia, inducting about 300,000 men into the military that year. The deferment was one of five Mr. Trump received during Vietnam. The others were for education.” The New York Times
In 1968 Trump began his career working for his father in real estate, blissfully unaware of a war half a world away that killed over 58,000 Americans and caused permanent physical and mental disabilities in thousands more.
My theory, and I find statistics do back this up, is that those who went to Vietnam or went straight into jobs in trades like coal mining and factory jobs, felt left out and let down by an ever expanding economy and higher education rates. They may have felt like losers for not getting better careers, because of their lack of education and connections. Statistics show how financial insecurity played a rolein attracting Trump voters, but education levels mattered more than income levels.
“I love the poorly educated,” Trump famously said after winning the Nevada Caucuses in February, 2016. Apparently, for many of those voters, Trump offered them a chance to not feel like a loser for the first time in a long time.
He relates to those who missed out on the 60s revolution and higher education, training that teaches us to respect scientific data when it warns us of warming oceans and catastrophic hurricanes.
“Clinton gained over 8 percentage points on Obama’s 2012 performance in the 50 best educated counties, but lost over 11 points in the 50 least educated counties.” — Seven Surprising Graphics About Trump Voters
I find this cohort explanation satisfactory to explain that both the older, wealthy Americans who fear losing their wealth, and the uneducated who have felt like losers in this ever-expanding global economy, not to mention the purely fascist, racist segment, elected this president.
Lately I have been observing how generational our belief systems can be. For example, as a middle boomer, born in 1955, most of my life I have taken a narrow view of what a good work ethic looks like. Most of us were raised to believe that being busy each day and having something to show for your efforts, especially MONEY, is a job well-done.
This is what I learned from changing my perspective on the ways we choose to spend our time as we age:
Midlife and especially retirement is your time to learn something just because you have always wanted to. It’s time to follow your fantasies and dreams for once in your life, while releasing expectations and, of course, guilt.
Be grateful each day that you now have the time and money to do something completely different! How many individuals in the history of mankind have had this privilege? Very few. Most previous generations didn’t live past 60!
After taking my writer fantasy for a spin for ten years, we decided it was time for my husband Mike to experiment with one of his childhood fantasies. He had always wanted to construct a passive solar home positioned just right for fantastic views of the mountains. In the process of planning this new adventure, I found a great cartoon in New Yorker Magazine that shows a man visiting a guru at the top of the Himalayas.
After we created our new passive solar home, I was then able to construct another lifetime fantasy of mine, a foothills garden full of xeric plants that love this high, dry landscape as much as we do. As I wrote this, we got our first snow fall! Yippee!
Because of what I have learned about midlife and the amazing experiences we have had in the past 15 years, I can highly recommend that you ask yourself today:
What perhaps irresponsible, but joyful dream or activity have you been fantasizing about forever? Time’s a wasting! Do it TODAY!
What does following what may seem like one crazy dream, feel like?
Late in 2007, I decided to start my first blog. This was an experiment for me, a way to see if I wrote about my true feelings as a 52 year-old female American, others might come and find ways to relate. I admit. I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was doing, but I still love my byline:Looking back I would say this experiment worked. Within a year or so I had thousands of followers, and eventually well over 500,000 were following the Midlife Crisis Queen. A number of books followed.
The point of all of this was for the benefit of others. I hoped to encourage those who felt lost in the debilitating fear and doubt that midlife can create, and to show how normal these feelings were. I thought perhaps by showing how I had overcome enough confusion and doubt to move forward into a new writing career, I could give others hope. This was in the midst of alarming suicide rates among our 50+ population, which still continue. I wanted to show how my own difficulties eventually led to new enjoyment of life itself for me, after suffering a devastating midlife crisis in my late 40s.
This quote from RuPaul describes my feelings well at this life juncture:
“I was always looking for some way to fit onto this planet…To be open enough to hear the Universe’s stage directions.”
Finally, at age 63, I feel like I have “heard the Universe’s stage direction.” I am pleased to announce, for the first time in my life I see myself as a visible positive spirit in the lives of others, and in my own life. My writing career has played an integral role in this transformation.
There is something about writing, especially for an audience, that causes the writer to finally see and hear themselves in new ways. I kept a journal for decades before my midlife crisis caused me to begin sharing my thoughts and feelings with others, but it was only through writing and relating to others that I discovered my deeper Self, the Self that finally wanted to be seen and acknowledged.
Almost everyone gets into published writing to reach others, and yet the real rewards come from truly hearing yourself for the first time.
Sometimes when I read something I wrote years ago I see the person who always felt inadequate or like she might never fit into this world, one who did not want to be seen by others. For example, these days when I communicate with some I went to high school with, they invariable don’t remember me. That was my unconscious goal back then. I did not know how to appreciate my unique qualities, let alone share them with others. I literally did not feel comfortable being myself.
“The hardest battle you will face in life is to be no one but yourself, in a world which is trying its hardest to make you like everybody else.” — From a high school graduation announcement
Today I regret that it has taken me this long to become my true Self and appreciate my best qualities. Why did this take me so long? But then I see that most of the human race historically had no chance of discovering their true Self or valuing this amazing resource. Most just did what they were told and then died.
I so clearly see now that I am not the person my parents tried to make me, or all those rotten bosses I had through the years. I am uniquely myself today and that feels like an amazing accomplishment.
If this topic interests you, perhaps you might enjoy my exploration of what midlife means to human beings on this planet today:
I’ve been enjoying a Louis L’Amour novel this fall, while also indulging myself in some amazing quaking aspens.
Up above Cuchara near Cordova Pass…
and up by Blanca Peak! Now is the BEST TIME to see these beauties!
Have you ever read the novel Conagher? A friend bought me a copy and said I had to read it, so I did. She said it reminded her of her dilemma since she moved here a few years ago. She loves the silence and isolation of her new life in the mountains, but sometimes craves companionship with someone special.
I thought Mr. L’Amour only wrote about the men of the West, but this novel is about a lonely female settler in rural New Mexico in the late 1800s who finds an ingenious way to connect with lonely cowboys. She even finally finds love way out in the middle of nowhere and just by chance. I love Mr. L’Amour’s descriptions of the beautiful but lonely West. Here’s a few lines from the main character Evie:
“She never tired of the morning and evenings here, the soft lights, the changing colors of sunlight and cloud upon the hills, the stirring of wind in the grass. Out here there was no escaping the sky or the plains, and Evie knew that until she came west she had never really known distance.”
I find it interesting how this character somehow captures my own feelings after just a year or so of living here, giving a marvelous explanation of how one adjusts to the silence and beauty of this powerful and yet desolate landscape:
“Evie Teale suddenly became aware of something else. For the first time she was at peace here, really at peace. She had believed the land was her enemy, and she had struggled against it, but you could not make war against a land any more than you could against the sea. One had to learn to live with it, to belong to it, to fit into its seasons and its ways…”
Looking back I would say this experiment worked. Within a year or so I had thousands of followers, and eventually well over 500,000 were following the Midlife Crisis Queen. A number of books followed.
What could be better than free, natural late day entertainment? Clouds came in over the Spanish Peaks after a brief rainstorm…
and then the rainbow.
Adventures of the NEW??? Old Farts 