Just heard about another suicide.  The brother of an acquaintance.  Another white male between the ages of 35 and 50 who just gave up.  I don’t blame him.  Give someone with no money, no prospects and no life a reason not to give up.  And don’t turn to that old chestnut about how life is a gift.  Or that he had people who loved him.  The people who love you are the ones who screw with your head the most.

Mom said she doesn’t understand why young men in their forties keep doing it.  Mom isn’t generally stupid, but she can be really myopic sometimes.  She’s in her mid sixties, so people in their forties are “young.”  I told her, “It’s because we’re not young, and because we see no future.”  No response on that one.

People in their forties, specifically men in their forties, came of age during Reagan’s term in office.  We were all basically taught, or indoctrinated with, the same notions.  Money isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.  Nothing matters except making money.  The measure of a man is how much money he makes.  Sure, you should be a good person and care about other people and be kind to dumb animals and blah, blah, blah, but if you do all that and you’re not making a good living, you’re nothing.  This was the governing wisdom of the classes of roughly ’82 through ’89.  And now, more than two decades later, an awful lot of us aren’t making much money.  Some of us aren’t making any money and haven’t for quite some time.  Are you beginning to see the connection?

I know, it’s not just men, and it’s certainly not just white men.  Blacks and Latinos have their own crosses to bear, many of them a lot bigger and more oppressive than anything we spoiled, white, suburban turnouts have had to endure.  But we still have to live with the fact that we’ve failed to live up to Reagan-era expectations.  Well, one expectation, really.  We’re not making money hand over fist.  So we’ve failed.  We may be intelligent, insightful, compassionate, dedicated, humble and eager to make the world a better place.  But again, that’s all ephemeral if your bank account doesn’t measure up.

I’ve been hearing since 1990 that Generation X will be the first in history not to do better than the generation that preceded it.  That generation was the baby boom, the largest generation in history and the one whose members are still patting themselves on the back for the important things they seem to think they did in response to the establishment before they became the establishment and began pillaging the coffers like no one in history and then electing leaders who would enable them to the point that no one would ever be able persuade them to back off a little and let someone else have a few bites at the apple.

Today, wealthy boomers send their kids to exclusive private schools and ensure they live in insular worlds in which they only meet “the right kind of people,” all the while proclaiming to ache for the downtrodden and oppressed.  They just won’t admit that the reason they live in huge, well-fortified mansions in gated communities is so they and their children never have to interact with the downtrodden and oppressed.  It’s a little like the old humorous adage, “I am a friend to the working man.  And I would rather be his friend than be him.”

Of course, boomers are not the only ones living high.  Plenty of Gen-X and Gen-Y superstars have ascended to the upper echelons of success.  And they brag that they deserve it all because they earned it all.  They don’t want to hear about “socialist” concepts like “shared sacrifice” and paying their fair share.  They deserve it all because they earned it all.

They also don’t like to give much thought to the socialists who preceded them, the ones who did believe in things like shared sacrifice.  The ones who went to Europe and the Pacific to try and prevent democracy from falling to tyranny, and in so doing risked their lives and their futures.  The ones who paid a top-tier 91 percent marginal tax rate when the country needed more money that it ever had before.  They didn’t bitch and whine and call it socialism because incomes over a quarter million might have to pay 40 percent.  They didn’t tell the working classes, “send your kids to fight the kamikazes and the nazis, but we can’t be bothered because our kids are too busy ascending to the upper echelons so they can keep building our fortunes.”

All the shared sacrifice and balloon payments to the IRS were in the interest of preserving democracy against tyranny.  The word “socialism” has no place in that equation.  But today it’s all anyone can talk about, how we’re paying too much to the government and punishing the real heroes, the capitalists and entrepreneurs.

Well, I agree on one point: we are paying too much to the government, and the government has already spent too much.  Not “is spending too much.”  The national debt is the cumulative debt we managed to build year after year by spending too much.  We’re 14 trillion dollars in the hole right now not because of current overspending.  Not at all.  In fact, if all the investment bankers and other multimillionaires and billionaires had been paying their fair share all along, and if we hadn’t started two wars that, regardless of what anyone thinks about their effectiveness, were outrageously expensive, and if we had paid for said wars out of pocket instead of piling on new debt each year, and if we hadn’t tossed another 400 billion on the fire to make pharmaceutical firms many times richer with an anti-free market Medicare prescription drug benefit (wherein the sellers set the price and the buyers, namely the government, pay that price without protest), and if we hadn’t made home ownership the nationwide be-all and end-all regardless of consumers’ inability to pay their monthly nut….if we hadn’t done all that, then this seemingly insurmountable national debt would be a good deal more surmountable.

I didn’t mean to make this political.  What’s at issue here is a past with nothing but promise and a future with none at all.  Where twenty years ago you worked and studied and struggled to get the right degree and the right job, and then you worked and struggled at that job so that eventually you would make lots of money.  And now, somehow, the long-term goals of your late teens have gotten away from you, or you just got “downsized” away from them.  All you’ll hear from those in power is that it’s your own fault and you need to stop complaining and get a job, even if there are no jobs to be had.  It’s your own fault you’re unemployed, your own fault you can’t see a competent physician and have that necessary procedure to try and maintain your physical health, your own fault that the personal debt you’ve already accumulated is playing havoc with your mental health, your own fault you lost the house you couldn’t afford because you took the mortgage you couldn’t afford, your own fault you can’t find a new job because you lost your old job so long ago that no one will even consider you since you’re obviously a slacker due to all this time you’ve been out of work….

You did everything right.  That is, you did everything they told you to do.  And everything went wrong.  And all you ever hear is, it’s all your own fault, and quit mooching off the hard-working taxpayers who were lucky enough not to be downsized and/or foreclosed upon.

You’ve failed, and yes, you should blame yourself.  The future holds no promise because, let’s face it, you’re such an irredeemable failure.  Your integrity and your humanity are worthless commodities, and you should abandon them the first chance you get.  The people in the next lane driving the German luxury car with all the amenities succeeded where you failed.  So why should they have to pay for your failure, for your inability to succeed?  If you really wanted things to be better, you’d get a damn job already and start contributing to the economy instead of mooching off it.  But you don’t want that.  You just want everyone to hand you everything.  The mark of a true failure in the greatest country on earth.

Mom can’t understand why so many white men in their thirties and forties are committing suicide.  Me, I can’t understand why there aren’t more suicides.  For us irredeemable failures, it’s really the only noble way out.