The simple life Dec. 21, 2023
The old man didn’t come to the chambers to say goodbye but
spoke remotely from his office for his last official public appearance before his
replacement gets sworn in just after the turn of the year.
I call him “Old”—which terrifies me since he is the same age
as I am – because he looks and sounds old, having aged significantly during his
21 odd years in the same elected position after having had a noted career prior
to holding it.
Everyone in the room responded to him appropriately,
although it did not come across as I might have otherwise expected, just words
for the parting leader of the county, when he clearly represented something
larger and more significant than his sendoff might indicate.
It felt like “just another day in the office,” kind of mood.
I suppose it hit me harder than others because his leaving
is the end of an era, or at least, the beginning of the end, our generation
finally giving up its grip on power to allow the next generation to fill our shoes.
Many of us do not have confidence the next generation will
be able to handle it, even though this is what our parents and grandparents
said about us when we rose to power, none of us nearly equal even the shadow of
those leaders who came before us.
The old man sounded as sad as I felt, knowing that he was
moving onto the final chapters of his book of life, and he will never again wield
the kind of power he once did.
Power is an illusion, just as fame is.
We ache for it, we strive to get it, we connive and
manipulate once we have it in order to keep it, but we really never had the
kind of grip on it we think we do, mere caretakers for the seats we’ve been
granted before the musical chairs of politics leaves us with no seat for us to
take when the music stops.
I never really took myself seriously enough in this regard
to miss it when it ended a few years ago, the column I wrote and which nearly
everybody read, being an illusion in itself, others taking it much more seriously
than I did, so, when the time came for me to give it up, I didn’t miss it
except for the extra money it provided me.
Coming to the chamber after having covered it more remotely,
I encountered a number of the others who I have associated with over the long years,
all of them greeting me like an old friend, all of them having aged
significantly as they plan their own departure, with younger faces waiting in
the wings to take their place on the stage, carrying with them a whole new
philosophy that makes me uncomfortable, and yet is not all that different from
the foolish notions we had growing up, maybe seemingly less silly than our
wearing beads, bell bottoms and Nehru shirts.
The old man’s voice cracked a bit as he spoke, somewhat
vague, somewhat lost for what to say his future might entail, expect to get his
golf score under 100, a strange testimony to a man who used to count votes
rather than golf swings.
This comes as the Freeholders – I insist on still calling
them because I refuse to cave into the work silliness the governor is selling –
voted on the transfer of land under the existing court house and other matters
that fall under the term “business as usual.”
Prior to all this, I had studied the photos on the back wall
of the chamber in which each Freeholder body was shown, some coming before my
time, but I found the place where my life started with them, and realized some
of those faces are gone as well, some passed away, but some simply shifted to a
new reality that did not involve their piece of the power grid.
As with most things in my life, I am an observer, someone
who sits on the edge of the world and takes note of the events that transpire,
having little or no investment in the outcome, except in the vague and
frustrated way people have when they see the world moving in an uncomfortable
direction.
In the end, all we have is what we carry on our backs. The
power is temporary as are those positions that grant us that power. Sometimes,
it is better not to have achieved such power at all because it is always
painful to have to give it up, as always happens, and we might pursue a simple
life, although as the rock song goes, “sometimes the simple life is not so
simple.”
I feel sorry for the old man because he is going to a simple
life after having lived a powerful one, and it is difficult to accept it when he’s
had so much more.
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