Disgraceful aging is also on the ballot

Neuroplasticity, exercise and a good therapist can help reduce the chances of becoming an embittered old asshole.

The political rally at Madison Square Garden Sunday was one of the strongest reminders of the kind of culture and country I don’t want to live in — one in which banal racism and gratuitous dehumanization are celebrated, and where the downward slide into an aggressively nasty type of old age, à la Trump and Giuliani, fails to generate a glaring question:

What in the aging process makes people, especially those who have so much, turn into that?

I’m not talking about dementia or mental illnesses (although Trump acts like a classic malignant narcissist) but an age-related sclerotic hardening of one’s emotional, intellectual and spiritual baseline into a personality of grievance. A bitter, old asshole.

To be sure, some of the worst rhetoric of the presidential campaign is manufactured for public consumption. The Republican party is trying hard to win an election by amplifying fear and loathing. But there’s no serious argument against the notion that Trump and Giuliani are emblems of ungraceful, if not disgraceful, aging.

Disgraceful aging, of course, isn’t unique to only one political party, demographic or socioeconomic class. Old liberals and Stanford Law students can be hypocritical, utterly clueless a-holes, too. But the tendency to sound like a paranoid midcentury white racist threatening violence if things don’t go his way is a distinct feature of aggressively intolerant old MAGA men.

They tend to be insecure blowhards — I believe the medical term is assoholics — who have no idea what being a man means in practice. But that’s a different story.

Regret and frustration in older assoholics

Among the best documented pathways that lead some people to descend into late-life negativity is an accumulation of regret and frustration often caused by big, unwelcome changes, including isolation or financial insecurity. Perhaps no change is more devastating than the gradual or sudden loss of physical ability — the inability to engage in stress-mitigating athletics or to walk down a staircase without help — that can trigger even more negative impacts, like depression and cognitive decline.

Neuroplasticity and exercise

There are ways to avoid the likelihood of aging into assoholism, and many of them fall into the complementary categories of neuroplasticity and regular exercise. But it seems to me that not becoming an old asshole is partly also a personal choice, and that people heading toward old age also need to think long and hard about who they want to become. We all need to purposely create a vision of ourselves 10, 20 and 40 years into the future. If you don’t spend time practicing some form of decency, generosity or, at the very least, the ability to recognize and then admit when you’re wrong, you’re leaving the door open a little wider to the possibility of aging into an emotional and spiritual cul-de-sac from which there is no U-turn.

Or, in the case of men, to the increased tendency of falling for false notions of what it means to be a real man who just happens to be old.

In this election, in addition to everything else that’s at stake, there’s also the choice to support or reject a candidate who has embraced aging into his final act with utmost hate and vengeance — a bitter choice none of us would ever embrace or want the people we care about to embrace.