By Michael Laws
I am 54 years of age – a time when you discover that your body is not an invulnerable vessel and that life insurance policies are promptly paid.
It is also an age when you become distinctly aware of a dreadful truth: that you have lived more years than you have left. And that, most probably, you have achieved as much as you are ever going to.
Because a new generation of the ambitious and the aspirational is already breathing down your neck. Stand aside old man, they whisper. Soon, they will roar.
Yes but I'm also a baby boomer. At the tail end of a generation that hasn't quite realised how old it really is. There's still a touch of the Peter Pan about us – we still can't comprehend the wrinkled fruit that blinks at us every morning in the mirror.
We are also the first generation that has dissolved, resolved and then dissolved relationships to quite the same degree. We have embraced separation and divorce as if modern technological marvels. And passed such behaviour on to our kids' generation. The world isn't quite as emotionally stable as we may prefer.
And if there's one thing a baby boomer hates – ironically – it is instability. We railed against conservatism and railed for change as kids. We wanted more freedom, not less and for a new liberalism to infuse society.
We look now at the effects of our demands and wonder if we got it right after all. It seems that not everyone can handle the new freedom nor the automatic questioning of every institution and all practices. Not even us.
We note that the ordered societies – especially the Asian – seem set to dominate. Sparta always did have the wood on Athens.
Yes, but there is something else. We are starting to die. This is the age when the diseases we have only read about, start to introduce themselves. When we start attending the funerals of friends and not just elderly relatives and random unfortunates.
Cue Sir Paul Callaghan. The former New Zealander of the Year – a decade older than myself – but facing the great void. The feted scientist has gone public that an alternative therapy aimed at halting his colon cancer has failed. Massive doses of intravenous Vitamin C have had no effect.
The news that such an esteemed rationalist had embraced such quackery provided a positive fillip for the odd, dippy and deranged everywhere. Indeed they started using Callaghan as a marketing device an "eff you" to empiricists everywhere.
Certainly Callaghan's odd coupling startled most of his scientific mates. But, as he now explains it, the whole course was an experiment. His prognosis is death – what could it hurt?
I think most of us would empathise. If the mainstream is failing then why not embrace the fringe? It is the only appropriate response for a baby-boomer.
Yes, but these are the days of mass quackery. Everything from St John's Wort to colloidal silver to homeopathy is paraded as the antidote to life's ills and the body's betrayal. Modern medicine is portrayed as a giant conspiracy – controlled by pharmaceutical corporates out to farm, rather than cure.
Most of us eschew such nonsense. We'll take the occasional trip into a so-called natural health shop but not at the expense of the mainstream. If we are really sick then it's to the doctor we go.
But you can understand the desperation of a Callaghan or of the parents of a child with a similar prognosis. You will try anything to forestall the looming evil of death. For a rationalist like Callaghan, only the void awaits.
Which is why I predict a resurgence of religion over the next 20 years.
Because the baby-boomers are dying and because we can't quite believe that our unique brilliance will be lost forever. There is nothing quite so proselytising as the imminence of mortality.
Initially, we will ask to be cured. For some divine intervention that allows us to continue to enjoy these sensual times. Eventually we'll settle for uncertainty. That we are not quite so sure that this is it after all. Anything that holds the promise that we live. Even when we are dead.
And yet the established churches all seem very odd. They are either fiercely traditional or haven't quite moved out of the 1970s happy-clappy Jesus revolution. There is nothing so excruciating as an Anglican church service where you are asked to embrace the asinine lyrics of old hippies.
But the Destinies are not for us either. We like to think that, if there is a God or some supernatural intelligence, that He/She/It gave us our brain for a reason. And it isn't to believe in a literal interpretation of the Old Testament.
Which means that I will probably have to form my own religion. And weld in that especial philosophy of our age and of our generation: that it's all about me.
And it always will be.
Sunday Star Times, 22nd January 2012
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