February 26, 2023 Dr. Roger Ray
“Age and Ageism regarding the Pandemic and Presidents”
David Wallace-Wells, NYT December 7, 2022
“given the underlying age skew, vaccinated people in their late 80s have a similar risk of Covid death as never-vaccinated 70-year-olds. Which is to say, some real risk. If it was ever comfortable to say that the unconscionable levels of American deaths were a pandemic of the unvaccinated, it is surely now accurate to describe the ongoing toll as a pandemic of the old.
The picture that resulted was hugely relieving to most of us without being, at the highest levels, misleading: Vaccination and natural immunity had indeed dramatically reduced the country’s overall mortality risk from Covid. But while it’s comforting to believe that protection is a choice, for some populations, it isn’t. And in moving pretty swiftly from treating everyone as high risk to treating everyone as low risk, we neglected to pay much attention to the differential of risk: that even if the average American had reduced his or her chances of dying from Covid by a factor of five or 10, 300 or more Americans might still be dying each day for many months, and there were probably some targeted things to do about that.”
It feels to me, that when I am going to deliver a sermon that is entirely out of sync with public conversation and thought that I almost need to quote Lewis Carrol’s famous poem in Through the Looking Glass:
The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.'
It is not uncommon for me to take my Sunday morning time to offer my answers to questions no one has asked me but today I may be wandering more into the comparison of two things that are different, like cabbages and kings, but which may be related in oddly disturbing ways.
You never get to finish one election before the talking heads in our 24 hour news cycle insist upon speculating, nearly full time, about the next one. At present, it seems to be nearly unavoidable that Joe Biden will run for re-election in 2024, when he will be 82 years old, and if Donald Trump manages to secure the Republican nomination again, he will be 78 years old on election day. Bernie Sanders will be 83 but I know that none of you want to hear me talk about him anymore. But 78 and 82 are pretty old, older than any presidential candidates in the past. But how old is too old?
No one asked me in 2020 if Biden was too old, but if you had asked me, I would have replied that he certainly was. He is 10 years older than I am and I know that I am too old to take on anything that would make me have to put in fifty or sixty hours of productive work every week and would frequently keep me from taking an afternoon nap. However, I think that we can all say, that had you asked me in 2020 about Biden’s age, that I would have been wrong. As history has delt its cards to us these past two years, with a hot war in Europe and the threat of an invasion of Taiwan by China on the horizon, Biden’s decades of experience in foreign policy have been crucial. In fact, I don’t know who would have been better to have had in the White House in the face of these very serious threats.
He isn’t a genius, he isn’t a scholar, he is a horrible public speaker, and he is an absolute gaff machine, but I and a whole lot of other people underestimated him and I can say, in all humility, that I am glad we have had his wrinkled hand on the rudder these past two years.
When a football quarterback is still on the field at 40 years old, that is national news. Serena Williams played professional tennis until she was 41 and commentators acted like that was a miracle. But we’re contemplating giving the nuclear football to a guy who would be 86 when he finished his second term. I’m not saying he couldn’t do it, but I am 66 and my daughter won’t let me eat on her sofa anymore; I’m just sayin.
Trump is not qualified to manage a hotdog stand, in his 70’s and I doubt he was any better when he was younger. But it should be apparent that Biden had skills in his 70’s that he would not have had in his 30’s or 40’s. There are things that people only learn through decades of experience. Our culture tends to worship youth, beauty, vitality, and, to put it plainly, “hotness.” But most of life is not about being sexy. Sometimes what we need most is wisdom and experience.
Early in December, the New York Times published an opinion piece by David Wallace-Wells that takes a very honest look at a neglected truth of the Covid pandemic. We have all started to act like the pandemic is over. Almost no one wears a mask, not even in crowded Christmas shopping department stores. We still have about 300 people dying from Covid every single day, nearly 10,000 people a month, making Covid one of the third leading cause of death in America, and we act like it is over.
Last January, President Biden said that Covid had largely become a pandemic of the unvaccinated and while being unvaccinated certainly increases your chances of either getting Covid or dying from it, the truth is that most of the people who are dying of Covid now have been vaccinated, it is just that 90 percent of the deaths are among people who are 65 and older.
An 80 year old who is vaccinated and boosted has a greater risk of dying from Covid than a 70 year old who isn’t vaccinated. Age has always been a huge factor in the lethal risk of Covid but it is even more true now. I have lately crossed the line, being now older than 65 and I have been vaccinated and I have had four booster shots. There are lab rats at Pfizer-Biontech that haven’t had as many vaccine jabs as I have had, and I got Covid – twice! I got the flu shot, and for the first time in my life, I just had the flu. The vaccines may have kept me out of the hospital, but they sure didn’t keep me in the racquetball court!
Which raises the question of whether we should have been so concerned about getting air purifiers in our schools when it was the people living in nursing facilities who were the most likely to die. I understand that we reflexively value the lives of the young more than the lives of the elderly but I’m saying that the lives of senior citizens also have value.
David Wallace-Wells reminds us in his article that conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro, as well as the lieutenant-governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, waved off the threat of the pandemic early in 2020 because only senior citizens were at risk. As if these one million deaths do not really matter because those people were going to die anyway. Everyone is going to die. The mortality rate is still 100%, but just because you may only have a decade of life left does not mean that your life is without value.
Consider this: Martin Luther King, Jr. was 26 years old when he completed his doctorate in theology from Boston University. He was the pastor at Dexter Ave. Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He had been hired by Dexter Ave. after they had accepted the resignation of his predecessor, Vernon Johns, who was always at odds with many members of the church because he was too political. King was hired with the solemn injunction to stick to the Bible and not get into politics.
But six months after he was awarded his doctorate, just six months later, some housekeeper in Montgomery, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man and move to the back of the bus. Now, that was not an accident, Rosa Parks had been preparing for some kind of civil rights protests for a long time, but it had nothing to do with Martin Luther King. But a few days later, when leaders of the black congregations in Montgomery gathered to discuss how to use the public furor over Rosa Parks’ arrest to the fullest, King didn’t even plan to go and had to be talked into leaving his home and infant child to attend the meeting.
At the meeting, older pastors who were very competitive with one another for recognition in the community realized that they had to reach some compromise in appointing a spokesperson for their protest and they couldn’t agree on giving that honor to any of the most established pastors, so they went with a safe choice, someone who wouldn’t steal the spotlight . . . they recruited Martin Luther King to be their spokesperson.
Everything you know about Martin Luther King, Jr., all of his speeches, marches, all of his books, the Nobel Peace Prize, everything you know about him took place over the next 12 years before he was murdered on April 4, 1968 when he was just 39 years old. It never ceased to amaze me that one of the most influential preachers in history would not have been considered to be old enough to be hired by most churches today.
By contrast, if you look at the timeline of Gandhi’s life, though Gandhi protested racial discrimination in Great Britain and began writing and discerning his ultimate mission of liberation of India earlier in life, his real public notoriety, when he led the famous salt march in 1930, Gandhi was 61 years old. His imprisonments, protests, books and demonstrations continued for the next seventeen years until India was given autonomy when Gandhi was 78 years old.
If Gandhi had been 39 when he was assassinated, as King was, none of us would have ever heard of Gandhi. If King had lived to be 78, well, who knows what he might have done.
There are things that only the young can do but there are things which call age and experience as well. Ben Franklin was 70 when he signed the Declaration of Independence. Nelson Mandela was 76 when he emerged from prison to be the president of South Africa. Mother Theresa was 69 when she won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The young and the healthy may choose to live as if things like Covid or the flu offer no real threat to them but even if they have no reason to fear infection for themselves, they live in a world in which we can be thankful for the contributions of people like Gandhi, or Joe Biden, or Mother Theresa. We are all connected and, we will all eventually be old if something doesn’t kill us first.
People are sometimes shocked when I remind them that the mortality rate still is what it always has been, 100% but none other than John Donne said it first, albeit rather more elegantly in his famous poem:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
