80 Years of Trying Is Circling Down the Drain
Yesterday, I turned 80 years old. My life has been very interesting. For most of my life, I watched my country of birth make progress. I tried to help it make that progress as a quiet, unnoticed activist. For a while, it seemed to be working. Now, however, it seems that all of that progress is like a waste product, about to be flushed away.
One week after I was born, the USA became the first country to use a nuclear weapon in wartime. We dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Shortly after that, we dropped another one on Nagasaki. The war ended. I was too young to know that happened, but I learned of it early in my life. It made me angry. I wanted to stop such insanity.
When I turned 6 years old, I was one of the first elementary school children to integrate a grammar school in my little California citrus farming town. A few of us went to first grade at the "Mexican School" in that community. We broke new ground, I guess. I learned to speak Spanish from my new friends, so I could be polite to the grandmothers in their homes. Things got better, over time, in that town. Now, ICE thugs are rounding up people who have Spanish-sounding surnames there, whether they are US citizens or not. Things are falling apart. Life there for some is getting worse, not better.
By the time I was in high school in that same town, I watched and participated in creating a more respectful environment for my friends, and for the girls in that town, as well. Like most places, the late 1950s and early 1960s were pretty dismal if you were a girl. Little by little, that got better. When I started high school, a girl who got pregnant was immediately kicked out of school. By the time I left that high school, that was no longer the case. A year later, the birth control pill became available and they were teaching sex education, finally.
When I graduated in 1963, I was becoming aware of other wrongs. We were about to get into a war in Vietnam. Civil rights was in the news. There was talk about overpopulation as a threat to the environment and a creator of poverty. I decided I would not add to the problem, so I never had children. That was my contribution.
I had begun being political in 1960, when I started helping to elect JFK. I was always at Democratic meetings, moving chairs around and listening. I held campaign signs. JFK won. Then, in my Freshman year in college, JFK was assassinated. A shocking end to something that seemed promising.
In 1964, I dropped out of college. I was disillusioned and frustrated. I traveled around the country, visiting 40 of our states, while driving an old 1953 Chrysler New Yorker. I was in Selma, Alabama when people marched across the Edmund Pettus bridge, and heard MLK, Jr. give his "How Long? Not Long" speech in Montgomery. I returned to California and enlisted in the USAF to avoid being drafted into the Army. I didn't know what else to do. They killed MLK, Jr., too.
That kept me busy, and I spend a couple of years either learning Russian at a military school or working at a remote base in Turkey. I was thinking. I was trying to find a path that would let me help get the country on the right track. I came back to the USA and was stationed near Washington, DC.
There, I fell in with the anti-war protest movement, while still in the USAF. The DC area in the late 1960s was busy with anti-war protests, civil rights protests, women's rights protests and other activism. I was busy. I wasn't part of the leadership, but I met many who were. I was full of optimism. I had adventurous times for a while.
Then, I went back to California, back to college, got married, and started a career as a writer, never again working a W-2 job. I kept doing activism in politics. I got involved in Democratic Party organizations as a minor functionary, ending up years later as a precinct chair in Minnesota. I helped Democrats get elected. I wrote speeches. I wrote campaign literature. I made friends.
I watched women's rights improve. I watched as my LGBQT+ friends got married legally. But Republicans were still winning elections. There was progress, but it went back and forth again and again. It just didn't seem like Democrats could get on top and stay there. Back and forth. A little progress and then some backing up again. Over and over again.
It didn't get better consistently. Then we ended up with Donald J. Trump. The fact that he won even once was shocking. That he won again was a serious blow to my dreams. We just never seem to get a handle on getting and keeping power, and the other side keeps getting worse and worse. Trump is tearing down all of the progress we had made in previous decades. We had two chances to elect a woman as President. We fucked both of those chances up for very, very petty reasons.
Well, now I'm 80 years old and disappointed. This time, though, I'm also tired. I'm worn out. I'm running down. I'm going to have to let others try. It's too bad, and far from where I hoped we would be as a nation by now. I can no longer do anything about it, so I have to hope that others will take up the challenge and make things happen.
I didn't have children. So, I don't have to worry about the world I leave them. But, there are all the others. We seem to be on a downward path.
More's the fucking pity, folks! More's the pity.
= new reply since forum marked as read
afterr the harris loss i really feel 
i just exisat day to day any more and hope to be with my late mom soon so i dont have to slug through this time . but i hope i expire on his time and not mine. i just want to go " home "
I'm angry, sad, incredulous, disappointed,........ we carry on
I was born about a month before Sputnik, and have never done much besides vote. I went to a couple protests in early 2003 before GW invaded Iraq, and 5 so far this year.
The American Dream has always been a work in progress. The long arc may be slow, and it's heartbreaking to see it bending back the wrong way.
Thank You for all your efforts for so many decades.
You’re a DU treasure 
...for years and so I've gleaned some of this already from your many posts, but it's great to have it summed up so well in one statement. And it's such a strong statement (you are a writer by profession, after all) that I can only hope to make a couple of brief points.
1) I think everyone here is weary, regardless of age or health. You are no doubt correct about the morons who elected Trump not just once, but twice. However, as some have said (and you imply in your own statement), Trump is just a symptom of a larger problem. The problem is a uniquely American strain of what historian Morris Berman calls "the Anglo disease", seen to varying extents in all English-speaking countries. I would recommend that everyone read Berman, starting with his "America trilogy" of books. The most accessible of these is The Twilight of American Culture (2000). It's a fast read (I did so in one night).
2) As you say, "[the nation] didn't get better consistently." As a Gen Xer, one of the most difficult things to have witnessed myself is how so many of the world's great moral leaders (e.g. Gandhi, King) are cut down just as they are beginning to do some good. As is said in the Gospels, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country and in his own house” (Matthew 13:57). I was born at the tail end of 1968, a year that saw two of this country's best (King and RFK) murdered within two months of each other.
Having said that, part of me somehow retains a tiny seed of the patience seen in Buddhism (a faith which I do not profess): life is a process, ever-unfolding. We all each get only one vote in this existence, and to short-circuit that process often ends up in tragedy. One can easily see this in the billionaire class trying to dictate to the world how it should spin. History tells us that this will not end well.
I don't know what the solution is. Part of me also agrees with George Carlin, who once famously said that "America is an extremely limited experiment in democracy". And on Keith Olbermann's show, he simply stated "this country's finished". I have to say that I don't agree with Carlin, and yet, I wouldn't bet against him either. 
Many of us are doing the same thing. Some of us are pretty much walking corpses because of that single truth.
We accomplished little or nothing when it comes to what we envisioned for ourselves and our country.
It is hard to even think about it because it hurts too much.
For example, when Hitler & Mussolini rose to power did that continue in a straight line to a fascist takeover of the world? No, it did not. It prompted a serious backlash, a global (majority global anyway) rejection of their philosophy. That's just one example but the same thing has happened over & over again over the course of human history. Why would anyone think that today it's suddenly different? What evidence is there for the conclusion that human progress has now stopped ebbing & flowing, that some profound fundamental change has taken place in the evolution of human society (what change?), & the path of human societal change is now forever locked into the most recent path of Trumpian evil?
I don't mean to get on your case & be confrontational, I'm just trying to explain my view of the bigger picture. I hope that makes sense.
In a way, this all reminds me of people who, when there's a record cold winter day say "See, it's record cold, there's no global warming." They're reacting to recent short-term conditions, not the larger overall trend. Trump is the recent short-term condition. I'll need compelling evidence to convince me that Trumpism represents the long-term trend of human society. That all the good we worked for is truly lost.
I hope I've explained myself well, I've learned that sometimes I'm not very good at it.
