You can't always get what you want

Or even get what you need

You can’t always get what you want

But if you try sometimes

You’ll find…you get what you need.

~~~Rolling Stones

Or not, right? It looks like half the USA won’t get what it wants in this election.

I came of age with the Stones, the Beatles and the belief that we can change the world. Many of us wonder now… what happened?

We wanted nothing short of transformation for this world. Ecological politics. Fair economics. Well, fair everything! We seemed to make big strides, but the headwind is strong now.

We sang: “Last night I had the strangest dream, I never dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.” Well, that hasn’t happened.

“Where did all the flowers go” of my Boomer generation’s dreams?

The 2024 election has all of us on edge.

I now serve on the Board of Post Carbon Institute. It’s staffed by GenXers - rational, hard workers heirs to Boomer big ideas and to hard nosed research on our collective slide off the cliff of collapse.

I visited the team last night. They produce research, podcasts, an online journal, deep dive education and books - all designed to educate and resource what we call the “walking worried.” They/we do great work, we innovate, we test, we stay upbeat and creative. Last evening I could feel an undertone of perplexity and pain in us. The October surprises of hurricane destruction, election acrimony, the shocking death toll and destruction of Israel’s expanding war against all its enemies make upbeat very hard.

Life Review for my generation

My generation is in our 60s and 70s. We didn’t factor in that we might not get what we want nor what we need. Quite the opposite. Looking back on our generation’s leadership, it’s hard to reconcile with what we ended up with.

This is the work of coming of aging, to reconcile our dreams with our lifetime’s results.

My work to accept the whole bundle of light and dark of my own life has offered spaciousness and perspective and a growing lightness of being. Can my generation also bring such a spirit to this election. Can we metabolize our unfulfilled dreams for the world such that we don’t add to the general hysteria?

What would eldering look like if we don’t get the results we want once all the votes are tallied and tallied and challenged and tallied again?

Right now, hysterical, eschatological rhetoric is flying around from all sides. Many of us can’t believe someone would vote for the other candidate – don’t you see what will happen!!!!

Life review at a collective level, as two of my favorite historians, Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder show us, reveals the ways we’ve been here before, in the United States and in world history. It also shows that somehow humans have found a way through, evidenced by the fact that our species is still here.

Financial bubbles burst, revolutions changed political systems, civilizations have crumbled with their leaders still proclaiming that the sun never sets on their particular empire. We see countries devastated that were once vibrant, and countries emerging that were defeated. At the same time, irreversible damage has been done, like species extinctions, and once flourishing ecosystems turned to desert.

Humanity may not recover from these forces, and it should be profoundly sobering.

One gift of elders is to hold the long view, and to hold, calmly, the possibility that what we count on and cherish is passing away. This is true for the ends of our own lives and the end of our stable planet and stable institutions of managing the commons.

Taking the long view is not giving up

None of the candidates will save us from the fate already in motion through collapse. We keep hope alive because we need that space for creative action, but hope as a choice of the spirit, not as a naïve certainty that “we can change the world.”

This is a hard pill to swallow. How far we’ve come from the Beatles and Rolling Stones and the rest of the minstrels of our generation.

Elders can resist throwing up their hands in disgust, though, or acting out by blaming others. They can choose to not get grumpy or resentful that the world did not listen to them. They can resist re-litigating the hands they were dealt. Elders can carry a longer time frame and a bit of eternity in their bodies, and ask what might do the least harm, if not cause the most good, for their people.

We enter the fray with as much clarity and calm as possible, we have the hard conversations, we don’t panic, duck out and hide. We do this at least as best we can.

Undecided voter

I posed a question to the FIRE (financial independence) community, an unusually rational and dispassionate group. I asked: If you are undecided, what are the pro's and con's you are considering about each presidential candidate that make you undecided or on the fence. Here’s one very useful balanced response:

I have friends who are vehemently left and right. But how can we understand one another without discord/perspective, patience?

I'm an undecided Independent and mostly my decision weighs on the viewpoint of fiscally conservative, socially progressive. And comparing the two economic policies, one would be the same policy of inflate and grow which benefits asset holders, while the other is creative destruction (tariffs and mass reduction in labor) which would disrupt the current system in favor of whatever adapts best in the new environment.

In our current economy where the system benefits legacy (hoarding assets over time), a disruption is actually long over due (too big to fail, bailouts, printing press, massive fiscal stimulus in time of economic prosperity). This disruption most likely would lead to recession/depression (shortages, initial price increases, but ultimately recession/depression/deflation) and as result lower asset and other prices.

The current continuous growth in asset prices fueled by debt doesn't seem sustainable. It sacrifices the future for the incumbent/current by increasing the difficulty of younger people/new entrants from gaining entry to purchase assets, entering markets, and staking their own claim on wealth/community/industry. The interest on the national debt is more than we spend on defense and growing.

Socially, it's obvious which is the better choice, except for the international war front where there seems to be no answer/solution against the status quo. The other promises a day one end to them all (doubtful, but better than status quo).

So, there's the dilemma, status quo or disruption. Neither are great choices.

Now for my calculus on this election:

Any third-party candidate, no matter how much their critiques and promises make sense, are wild cards, and could tip the election one way or another not out of preference for the two main candidates but as protest. In any states where the election hangs in the balance, it’s a very consequential choice. I’m not making that one.

We’re left with the duopoly. I have opinions about Trump that I need not repeat. I notice, though, that there’s a mirror world where others feel as vehemently as I do about “the other side.” Each points at the other saying, Lies! It sometimes feels like a playground. “I’m rubber you’re glue, everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” What if, though, it’s really a choice between disruption and continuity, not personalities or promises.

Trump represents disruption. Disruption leaves destruction in its wake. It also releases pent up energy around a sense of injustice – justified or not. There’s whole volumes more to the story, of course. I just want to point out that “burn it down” is in the air, as it has been in the past, and it has been in most revolutions - even if people don’t see the source of their suffering or the consequences of the fire.

Kamala represents BAU – business as usual. So much is wrong with BAU. However, there are movements that know how to pressure this system and can make a difference. We have not gotten what we want, but we know how to stay with the trouble, to keep calling out wrongs and calling for change. At least we can hold the line. Sometimes.

For me, at a time when our climate and justice and war fates hang in the balance, I will vote for a party that has demonstrated commitment to work on these serious issues in a sober way. Maybe I’m showing my age. But isn’t that what coming of aging is - for good or ill?

I will not insist that any candidate can reverse what can’t now be reversed or make whole what has already been destroyed. Neither one will stop the wars in process without sowing the seeds of the next war. That’s the undone work of our generation and the work of generations to come, if we can navigate these dangerous straights.

As an elder, I know that stability is not submission, but rather protection of life. I know that nothing is perfect and that’s not giving up hope but rather facing the reality of our species to date.

In this imperfection, I choose to vote the party that has demonstrated care for life. And that, for me, is the Democrats.

Beyond that, I intend to be stable and courageous whatever the outcome. Because, as an elder, I have the privilege of taking the long view.

What about you? How are you steadying yourself in these storms?