Archive for April 4th, 2011

Threescore and Ten

For those of you who weren’t around in King James’ time, threescore and ten is the Biblical length of a man’s life, seventy big ones. This is being written on my birthday, March 31, so you can’t see it until what some have called my natural birthday or later.

From my long-ago reading of the Old Testament, it says that Methuselah lived almost a thousand years and others back then nearly as long. Then, and from what I remember this is not overstating the case, God got sick of us.

Jehovah simply refused to deal with us for so long a time and cut us down to 120 years max. As it happens, 120 seems about the absolute limit now which nobody quite reaches.

It is true that the average age of expiration on the human delivery box is much, much higher today, but that is because of earlier infant mortality and hard life of the average hunter-gatherer or peasant. Surprisingly, the maximum hasn’t changed that much since the sixth century and after, when the Old Testament was actually written.

It was not unusual for a classical Greek of the upper classes not only to live, but to be fully active into his nineties, but then, as now, that 100 is a long climb and a serious upper limit.

In the 1950s a person reaching 100 was sometimes on the news. Invariably the birthday boy or girl was sitting in an easy chair. It was clear sitting upright was only for special occasions.

BRIEF special occasions.

There is a guy in my apartment building who is 83 and still has the energy of a ten-year-old kid. It is very hard to tell the age of people when they get my age, but there are lots and lots of people older than I am, and while they can’t do what a teenager CAN do, they can do pretty well everything that a teenager WANTS to do.

With one exception.

In fact, all that football practice and running is miserable for most people. Today entertainment consists largely of sitting there at machines.

This is one of those quiet revolutions that everybody sees and THEREFORE nobody THINKS about it.

The budget cannot be balanced while the population has a soaring burden of retirees. Our budget crisis is largely a result of the Green No White Children Movement represented by the movie Soylent Green in the hippie years.

So we filling in with colored immigrants and huge nonwhite families and the economy has, for the first time in white American history, gone into stagnation and will be doing the usual colored downslide in the not-so-distant future.

Everybody SEES it happening, but, as in the case of the Mantra, no one NOTICES the obvious in action.

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