Beasley: As 65 closes in, all things old are new again, and not in a good way

I have been getting Medicare-related insurance advertisements by the bucket-load in my mail for the past six months, signaling that next month I will reach that milestone birthday, my 65th. I don’t feel old; in fact, I must admit that it feels great to approach 65 and have a considerable amount of my youthful ideology and thinking still intact.

At an age when many of us start to look backwards more than forward, I find most of my thoughts are aimed toward the future. However, something has come close to stopping me in my tracks as I bear down on my birthday: my realization that, in a most disturbing way, an old adage has come to life. “Everything old is new again” is a proverbial comment that I always equated with fashion, fads or ephemeral trends. I have never thought of this phrase signaling anything of serious consequence or describing anything foreboding in the cycles of history. However, when I look at life in America in the year that I turn 65, it scares me profoundly to see how many “old” social, political, and philosophical ideologies that we thought we had squelched are suddenly “new” again in 2015.

I came of age in the late 1960s, a time when the world was changing rapidly and those of us lucky enough to be entering college and/or adulthood in the milieu of all this upheaval could see that long-held prejudices and injustices seemed to be melting. We were forced by the tide of events to think about the adult world we were entering. In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was killed the night before my senior prom; Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated the night I graduated from high school. I have never thought since about my prom or graduation without first remembering the national tragedies that accompanied them. We who turn 65 this year came of age in a world rocked by violence, prejudice, inequality and often intolerance.

Sadly, those of us naive enough to think that we have eliminated those things only need to take a long, hard look around in 2015. In 1968, when I was 18, there were riots and demonstrations decrying racial prejudice; the nightly news was filled with video footage of clashes between police and protesters. I see the same thing on the news now every night.

In 1968, there was a national, bipartisan push to mitigate poverty in America. One of our fellow South Carolinians, Marian Wright Edelman, a native of Bennettsville, was a young congressional staffer at the time and convinced a handful of senators of both parties to come with her to visit a few families in Mississippi to understand the effects of poverty up close. Their reaction was so profound that within weeks of their visit, national legislation had been introduced — supported by both parties — that began a series of programs to help poor people in America. We might have been overly optimistic to think that this train of insight and compassion would just chug right along for decades to come. We don’t need to look very far to see that the train is derailed: Today, we live in a state that has denied extended Medicaid coverage to some of our state’s poorest citizens, leaving them in tenuous situations. And in 2015, we are still dragging our feet in providing funding to give our state’s poorest school districts equal opportunities.

And women silly enough to think that we are living in a post-gender-discrimination world need look no further than the current session of the Legislature. One of our own lawmakers, in a misguided attempt at humor, referred to women as “a lesser cut of meat.” Using “meat” as a metaphor for womankind is awful enough, but to pair this with an adjective describing the female gender as “lesser” is so retrograde that it strains credulity.

But as I prepare to turn 65, the worst old thing that has come back to be new again is our general sense of intolerance and suspicion for those who are different from ourselves. This, teamed with our disinclination to compromise or bend to accommodate views other than our own, is turning us into a bitter, sour nation. I would like to live my post-age 65 years in a more enlightened, stronger country, and I certainly want my three grandchildren to grow up in one.

This story was originally published May 12, 2015 at 7:55 PM with the headline "Beasley: As 65 closes in, all things old are new again, and not in a good way."