A Lament--With a Spark of Hope

I am the silent majority.
I am the endangered middle class.
I am the fifty-something American citizen, bound to conform to the realities of the out-sourced twenty-first century workplace—minimum compensation in exchange for minimum commitment—for at least another decade. Or maybe forever.
I no longer dream of retirement, because I will neither be able to count on the government program into which I paid all my working years to sustain me; nor will I be able to depend upon the pension in which I invested a lifetime of drudgery, so that I could still enjoy my golden years in the not unforeseen event that Social Security would collapse before I drew my first dime.
I will need to work until I drop dead, which I will most likely conveniently do ten or twenty years before my time, since I can afford neither the medical care nor the drugs to keep me healthy.
I am a Democrat, a Republican, an Independent, an apathetic. I am a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, a Muslim; a Buddhist, a scientologist, an agnostic. I am white, black, hispanic, Asian, Native American. Neither religion nor politics, race nor ethnicity can cull me from this colossal herd shuffling off to a dark, ailing, impoverished demise.
I am a former beaded, bell-bottomed Viet Nam War protestor, who foresook activism somewhere between high school and life, and is only now shaking out of my ears the debris from those thirty intervening years of keeping my political head firmly planted in the sand.
I am a Baby Boomer. And my only salvation is myself: the silent majority, clearing its throat.

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