What ails America, part B

Health hysteria, individual or environmental, is everywhere. Actually, rampant I believe. I used to think this foolishness was confined to dopey, ex-hippies who claimed to be sensitive to or negatively impacted by all sorts of things in life. Or generated by the Cosmic Organics people who developed a rash if they inadvertently ate a tomato from Chile.

Nowadays, my local Senior Center has notices on the doors saying you cannot wear any scent in the building. People near where I live claim they get vertigo from a wind turbine located at some distance from their homes. Others claim their children misbehave because of it. A lady I know says she gets headaches from RF waves and won’t let the gas company put a new meter on her house.

There are reasons New England has the highest gasoline, home heating and electricity rates in the country. Proposals to build refineries are always defeated, off or on shore LNG terminals are protested, wind turbine farms are in court for ten years, high tension electricity lines are halted.

I remember when a new soccer fields or park or library was thought to be a good thing for the town. Not anymore. NIMBY rules the land. An elderly couple here recently halted construction of a mixed housing development because it would be on land behind their house and they wanted the land, although it is privately owned, to remain undeveloped regardless of the general welfare.

The larger issue, of course, is that we, as a country, as a society, are totally unable to determine what would be in our overall best interests and proceed from there. We use the Interstate Highway System every day but are resigned to the fact that it could not be built, and certainly cannot be expanded, today. We complain about the cost of gas and electricity and heating oil but we refuse to do anything that would help to reduce those costs. If the proposal adversely affects one nut, in good conscience we cannot go forward.

This does not bode well for my town, Massachusetts or America.

The trouble with old people, part 47

A community, like Yarmouth, like Cape Cod in general, with a larger percentage of elderly residents than the statewide or nationwide average will suffer severe consequences. Especially if they live alone. The real tragedy isn’t that the elderly are terrible drivers famous for hitting the gas in front of hair salons or tattoo parlors and crashing through the front windows. It’s not the left hand turn signal that never goes out no matter which direction they are travelling. No, it is even more serious than that.

Old folks, and we have twice as many as the rest of the state as a percentage of our total population, eventually stop shopping and going out to eat. They get Meals on Wheels. The only workers they require are minimum wage home health aides and grass cutters. They require serious health care assistance and more drug stores per capita than casinos in Las Vegas. They stop making any contribution to the local economy. They start to drag it down.

And they vote, against everything. School funding can’t be improved, town infrastructure maintained, new projects, like sewers or mixed housing developments, can’t get started. After town meeting or voting they gather on the sidewalk bumping into each other’s walkers and wondering out loud where they are and commenting to each other about the high taxes keeping them from going to Foxwoods more than twice a month. They won’t sell their retirement homes and simply stop maintaining them instead. The grass grows up and the trim paint peels off. Property values in the neighborhood decline but they don’t care because they can’t see the messy pile they live in for what it really is.

That cheap wooden ramp up to the front door is always an attractive feature. The general thought today is that moving in with one of the children and perhaps the grandchildren would be a big negative for everybody.

And that may be true if you are as cranky, depressed and unpleasant to everyone as many of these folks are. That’s perhaps why no one comes to visit any more. It’s not just that “everyone is dead” as you like to say, it’s more that you have grown into an old asshole.

My grandmother Callery came to live with us when her husband died and we were little children. She cooked and cleaned, made pleasant conversation with the parents, watched the children and contributed to the family. Because she had worked before Social Security she had no income of her own. Now, I’m not suggesting making old people dependents of their families but I can’t help but think that many elderly would actually feel better and have a better outlook if they were part of an extended family on a regular basis.