Somehow, I have slipped into what is euphemistically referred to as the “golden years.” After decades of toil I am now considered both obsolete and surplus in terms of the working world of productivity, and am expected to vanish from the statistical model measuring the nation’s economic health. Unfortunately, due to external realities and my own somewhat lax attitude toward employment over the years, there is no prospect for myself or my country to survive old age under the current operating plan.

Growing up during the Cold War caused many of my generation to believe that there was no need for long-term planning or career paths, due to the impending nuclear holocaust for which our nation and the communists were busily preparing. Even the dimmest of us understood that “duck and cover” under our school desks wasn’t likely to save many lives, and when our parents began digging bomb shelters in the back yard and we all wore I.D. bracelet so we could be buried with our families, the nihilism of the “beat generation” became contagious.

Thus was born the carefree ’60s, with the casting off of restrictive mores and standards. A totally permissive youth culture that cared little or nothing for the American dream became celebrated in the media and spread world wide, creating its own mercantile exploitation in fashion, music and lifestyles. Pot, bell bottom trousers and Nehru jackets in psychedelic prints. The crumbling of western civilization, as performed by people having too much fun to care for the highly questionable future.

Time flies like an arrow (fruit flies like ripe bananas) and one day comes a letter informing me that I will have some piddling amount of money each month for simply having survived the working world, complete with deductions, for some 44 quarters over five decades, a sum I barely topped, thanks to the Eisenhower decision to put the military pay under Social Security. Suddenly I was officially old, my adventures were history and my opinions and values irrelevant to the movers and shakers of whatever generation has succeeded the yuppies in the continued evolution of life as an experiment.

The failure of the economic engines of capitalism in the new millennium raises the ante for elder survival, and like many other graying rangers, I will continue to work as long as I can construct rational sentences and grammatically imaginative prose, staying well by being a veteran and trying to avoid the collapse of society by lying low in one or another outback retreat.

Whatever the situation, members of my generation are going to be the strangest geriatric gangsters in American history, because we still can’t take it all that seriously. None of us are going to get out alive, anyway.

“Travus T. Hipp” is a 40-year veteran radio commentator with six stations in California carrying his daily version of the news and opinions. "The Poor Hippy’s Paul Harvey,” Travus is a member of the Nevada Broadcasters Hall of Fame, but unemployable in the Silver State due to his eclectic political views.