Once more a "we need to protect the flag" amendment is up before congress. It could not be more politically timed. It is soon to be July, wherein the Fourth Day thereof is our national Holy of Holies, when all the good citizens can get hammered on bad beer and…
Earlier today, President Bush said it was "disgraceful" that the news media (i.e., the New York Times, LA Times & Wall Street Journal) disclosed his secret CIA program to illegally wiretap millions of financial records at the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication ("SWIFT") to search for terrorist suspects. Likewise,…
In "What is Conservative Culture?" (July 3, 2006 issue of The New Republic), Rick Perlstein reports that a new kind of prom has spung up in some fundamentalist communities. It's not for high school seniors but for prepubescent girls. They dress up in party dresses and take their fathers as…
I've been watching to see what the Bush Administration will do for its "October surprise" to give Republicans a boost in the polls just before the November mid-term elections. According to this article (http://news.yahoo.com/fc/world/iraq), the Whitehouse appears to be planning sharp troop withdrawals starting in September. After more than two…
Next month, it will be 467.
How do I know? I consulted one of the many life expectancy calculators available on the Internet. The MSN calculator I used takes into account personal behavior, family and personal health, lifestyles (including alcohol and cigarette use), diet and exercise and driving habits. Based on my lifestyle habits, I have just determined that I’m scheduled to die at age 89, 39 years from now.
I have no grounds to complain about the small-seeming number of months I have yet to live. I’m certainly not looking for pity. Compared to many other people, I’m doing well. People in the Stone Age (ca. 8000 BC) lived only about 20 years. At the beginning of the 20th century, the average person lived only until my current age, 50. In African countries hit hard by AIDS, the average person lives a total of only 30 years, significantly less than my remaining life expectancy at age 50. This is a phenomenal and disturbing statistic: at age 50, I am expected to live longer than a child born today in Zambia.
The reason I wrote this post, though, is that calculating my remaining life expectancy is much more than mathematics. I’ll try to explain. Perhaps this experiment won’t have the same effect on you, but it might.
First of all, why calculate my remaining time in months rather than the years? Because as an adult, the month turns out to be the most basic unit of time. Years …