NOT GOING GENTLE . . .

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. . . .”
From: Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” 1952

Several of my 60-ish and 70-ish friends have confided to me recently they are giving up, going on unemployment until they can draw Social Security, or going for “early retirement” which means drawing a slightly diminished SS check and opting into Medicare at the earliest possible moment. It’s just too hard to find a decent job or to start a business in “these economic times.”

Eight months ago most people never used the words, “the economy” in a sentence even once in a week. They were too busy using the words that are making a comeback now, “gas prices.” Now they say, ”the economy” or “this economy” every couple of hours. We’re scared and demoralized. The president scared us even more so he could get his precious stimulus bill passed. It passed. $13 more a week (if you’re working) starting around June. Oo-rah!

Then what?

Part of the problem is the age-discrimination thing. It’s hard to get people excited about it. What with so many single moms needing in-vitro fertilization and all. The forty-somethings at the bureaus which are supposed to enforce the laws against ageism have no vested interest in vigorously doing that. They think, “what if I need that job? Why should it go to or stay with that old person?” We’re used to that thinking because we subscribed to it back in the me-decades, the seventies, eighties and nineties. What goes around . . .

What my 60ish and 70ish fellows really mean is, “I’m dropping off the grid.” We’ll draw our puny government assistance all right—we deserve it; we paid into it all these years. But we’ll do things for which we can get paid in cash, and like Daschle or Geithner, we’ll forget to report it. Hey, we’re old, our memories are going.

This is how we’ll get our revenge against the marginalization of our kind—us old folks. We’ll babysit, carpenter, yardwork, powerwash, appliance-fix, car-fix, odd-job, flyer-handout, business-consult and any number of other invisible economy jobs, and the government won’t get the benefit of our taxes any more, or of our individual and collective wisdom (which it clearly doesn’t want, representing as it does, according to that limp-viper, Harry Reid, the “failed thinking of the past.”

Fail this!

Oh no, we’ll NOT go gentle into the good night of desperation and compliant despair, walking lockstep into the faceless maw of government-run warehouses for the old; we’ll coldly, quietly, invisibly, with all the beauty, cunning and calculation of that most elegant villanelle, “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”