THE TRUTH ABOUT OLD MEN - Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE

There are some small morsels of understanding that can only be reached by spending five or six decades breathing on the planet. Despite the popular notion that the only thing old men know is stuff that happened before the Internet was invented, the old man learned something new every day since entering the dubious realm of old men. To appreciate his keen capacity to continue learning, one must ignore the fact that he occasionally falls asleep at the wheel of his car.

There are some simple truths that, if widely acknowledged, would be damaging to the social order. To keep them secret, civilization and, in particular the nation we occupy, has over-complicated these truths with so much bluster and obfuscation that even the most erudite young man cannot reach them with his most profound application of intellect. And so...the period that follows middle-age is a sort of awakening akin to the one during which the old man learned to tie his shoes or knot his necktie. After focusing on what seemed like a complicated problem day after day for a protracted length of time, the simplicity of the exercise finally reaches him, and what was an enigma shrouded in confusion reveals itself to be, essentially, a puzzle a moron could solve, except for the aplomb with which civilization has kept it secret.

Once the brain has been seasoned by the passage of fifty or sixty years, once the testosterone has ceased to shape a man’s decision making process and the challenge to change the world has been replaced on his daily agenda by the challenge to digest Mexican food, these simple truths begin to emerge with astonishing clarity. Chief among the intellectual ambushes that fall away is the function served by the process of voting citizens into public office.

Personally, I have never cast a ballot in a solitary election even once in my life. I never fully understood my ambivalence to elections until I entered that shadowy time following middle-age when the solutions to mysteries that plagued me throughout my naïve youth became obvious. I always just told myself it felt like hypocrisy, but I could never explain that feeling to other people, so it remained for most of my life a private, dirty little secret. I didn’t vote.

Of course, I’ve heard all the criticism leveled at people who do not vote. Normally, it goes like this: “Your forefathers gave their lives to insure this freedom.” Suddenly, with absolutely no direct connection between the word “vote” and the word “freedom,” the process of casting the ballot became an expression of liberty in the minds of those making the criticism. Well, it wasn’t that suddenly. Actually, the connection developed long ago and has been reinforced through repetition across the two centuries of America’s preeminence on the world stage.

I was victimized by the charade until the age of 55. By then, I’d heard countless times about how America was on the way to this or that war zone to bring “freedom” to the people living in a nation run by a dictator where the right to vote did not exist. I’d seen dictators fall under American occupation over and again, believing without question that our penetration of that sovereign nation was motivated by our obligation to champion “liberty” across the world -- a noble calling. And all it took to “liberate” those unfortunate denizens of the dictatorship was to put in place a government run by people who were “voted” into office by the citizens. And so, the enduring myth that freedom and the right to vote were inseparable conscripted me for most of my life.

But there in the dark time following middle-age when the lights began to go on and the dogma and propaganda began to fall away I realized freedom was much simpler than the complicated construction of national governments. Freedom is about the absence of LAW...not the right to vote for the makers of law.

Law has only one function. It is to control the movement and behavior of human beings and, thereby, abbreviate their freedom. When we vote a congress into office that enacts a body of law which is suffocating in its mass we have not achieved freedom. We have achieved tyranny at the hands of elected officials.

It is difficult for an old man to avoid bittersweet, mortified laughter when presumably well-educated people show their faces on his television set and justify the invasion of a country as America’s responsibility to liberate that nation’s citizens by installing a government like the one which runs the USA -- the one which is mired in so much law the prison systems will not hold the criminals who violate it -- the one in which any policeman can arrest any citizen on a whim because an American cannot get from his home to his office without violating a litany of LAWS --.the one in which the courts are choked with cases involving infraction of laws which seek to regulate how a citizen may treat his own body -- the one in which each new bill that reaches the status of law is accompanied by a small herd of lesser laws piggy-backed upon it -- the one in which every day every politician’s primary ambition is to write additional law and the one in which the population has been so confused that it actually believes candidates for office who have written law should be returned to office on the basis of such achievements rather than made to explain the authorship of those laws as acts of incarcerating otherwise FREE citizens.

The smart old men learned this simple truth about law at an early age. They learned it in LAW SCHOOL. The secret held in trust by the lawyers at large in America is that freedom is not determined by the right to vote for the people who will further restrict the liberty of those they serve through the authorship of additional law, but by the mass of LAW which governs their movement and behavior. It is no coincidence that a preponderance of politicians is graduated from law schools. And it is no monumental intellectual achievement to decide upon graduation from law school that it is wiser to join them than to fight them.

This is the hypocrisy that orchestrated my decision to abstain from participation at the polls. Call it an act of moral indignation performed at an age too tender to interpret the simple truth that only an old man can see. And as I enter my sixth decade, I call it by something simpler still. I call it the truth about old men. Name it as the reason we seldom invite them to the party. Invoke it in the cloak of jaded points of view and reduce it to the predictable manifestation of the syndrome wise old men cannot avoid -- cynicism. For the real truth about old men is that they grow out of the mind-numbing control of certain widely maintained intellectual prisons designed to regulate civilized life the way children grow out of their belief in Santa Clause -- gradually, with jaws sagging in disbelief -- disbelief that they could ever have been so misled by so many people and such a mountain of nonsense so transparent they would require sixty years of mulling it over before they could reach clarity on the matter.