Reasonable Expectations And Hope Poem by gershon hepner

REASONABLE EXPECTATIONS AND HOPE


Reasonable expectations die from hope,
since the latter tends to neutralize
preparations we must make if we're to cope
with setbacks, so that prospects of surprise
make prophylaxis against what might happen seem
unnecessary, thus making us dependant
on what hope offers, mostly just a dream
that satisfies while fortune is ascendant,
but leads to ruin once it crashes to the ground
with all our hopes, which we see much too late
were false, when hoping for what seemed quite sound
is no more feasible, and therefore smashed.
It had a sell-by date, and seems no longer
the option we had hoped for when hope flashed
a message that regrettably was stronger
than reasonable expectations. From the rubble
that its crash created comes a slope
that seems to lead you out of all your trouble.
Avoid it, it's the slippery slope called hope.

Susan Jacoby ("Real Life Among the Old Old, " NYT,12/21/10) writes about turning 65:

I recently turned 65, just ahead of the millions in the baby boom generation who will begin to cross the same symbolically fraught threshold in the new year to a chorus of well-intended assurances that "age is just a number." But my family album tells a different story. I am descended from a long line of women who lived into their 90s, and their last years suggest that my generation's vision of an ageless old age bears about as much resemblance to real old age as our earlier idealization of painless childbirth without drugs did to real labor….
Yet people my age and younger still pretend that old age will yield to what has long been our generational credo — that we can transform ourselves endlessly, even undo reality, if only we live right. "Age-defying" is a modifier that figures prominently in advertisements for everything from vitamins and beauty products to services for the most frail among the "old old, " as demographers classify those over 85. You haven't experienced cognitive dissonance until you receive a brochure encouraging you to spend thousands of dollars a year for long-term care insurance as you prepare to "defy" old age.
"Deny" is the word the hucksters of longevity should be using. Nearly half of the old old — the fastest-growing segment of the over-65 population — will spend some time in a nursing home before they die, as a result of mental or physical disability.
Members of the "forever young" generation — who, unless a social catastrophe intervenes, will live even longer than their parents — prefer to think about aging as a controllable experience. Researchers who were part of a panel discussion titled "90 Is the New 50, " presented at the World Science Festival in 2008, spoke to a middle-aged, standing-room-only audience about imminent medical miracles. The one voice of caution about inflated expectations was that of Robert Butler, the pioneering gerontologist who was the first head of the National Institute on Aging in the 1970s and is generally credited with coining the term "ageism."
Earlier this year, a few months before his death from leukemia at age 83, I asked Dr. Butler what he thought of the premise that 90 might become the new 50. "I'm a scientist, " he replied, "and a scientist always hopes for the big breakthrough. The trouble with expecting 90 to become the new 50 is it can stop rational discussion — on a societal as well as individual level — about how to make 90 a better 90. This fantasy is a lot like waiting for Prince Charming, in that it doesn't distinguish between hope and reasonable expectation."

6/10/12 #10469