A Generation's Lead Poisoning and America's Toxic Politics: A Hypothesis

Could decades of pollution have laid the foundation for an angry, polarized nation today?

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Having turned 40 this year in January, I've now come to understand perhaps the key reason for the age’s infamy. It's at this point that the generation born after us has reached adulthood. The kids my high school classmates had the year or two after we graduated are now in college or already in the workforce. Before 40 and without children yet myself, it felt difficult to tell when the line actually was when I'd no longer be considered some kid who didn't know what he was talking about on anything. So I still felt young in a sense, that there were multiple generations still standing on top of me, regarding themselves as my superiors about everything.

That's really started to pass fully now at this point but it has less to do with the generation behind me, but rather the ones two and three ahead of me, that raised my cohort of young Xers, Xennials (where I identify), and millennials. I'm talking about the younger Silent Generation (1939-1944) and the Boomers (1945-1962 or so.)

I'm starting to think that something weird may be going on with this aging generation, something beyond what is understood as merely “normal aging.”

Tell me if this sounds at all familiar to you. Variations of this have happened to me the last few years with family members, friends, and former colleagues. At first I chalked it up to individuals just aging and changing with one common health problem or another impacting them. But now I'm beginning to suspect a much broader phenomenon going on here. It doesn't seem like the older Silent Generation (1925-1934) and the Greatest Generation (1901-1925 or so) aged quite the same way.

When I started my activist writing career full-time in 2009 I was 25 and most of my professional mentors and older colleagues were in their mid 60s or thereabouts. I tended to look at many of them with awe, by that point they weren't just writing about history, they had lived it and now were impacting it with their influence on politicians, cultural figures, and their ultra-wealthy friends. I tried to learn as much as I could from them all as I read their books and reported on their TV appearances. They were brilliant, open-minded, eager to keep learning more and writing about their new discoveries.

But no more. Now people I knew well for years in their 60s are now in their late 70s or over 80. And they are not the same people at all. This phenomenon is of course much more noticeable if you may not be in touch with the person for a few years. Then you can see the transformation much more starkly rather than an invisible, boiling frog situation where you see them regularly. It will also come out much more when they are stressed or in an unfamiliar situation. And don’t think it’s just at 80 when this can happen. I’ve also seen it happen earlier.

Here are the changes that I've seen recently in multiple people:

• A cognitive decline reminiscent of what might seem like Alzheimer's or dementia, an early onset of memory problems. You may have a conversation with someone for hours and they will forget the conclusion that you both reached at the end of it. This can be infuriating when you take a long time arguing about something and then seemingly come to an agreement about it only for them to re-open the argument again later as though you hadn’t take the effort and energy to already go through this with them.

• Increased anxiety, particularly overreacting to things that are trivial, an emotional instability. Watch them flip out over an even slightly challenging comment responding to them on social media.

• Choosing to withdraw from others and isolate themselves either physically and/or mentally. They retreat into a world of their own.

• A struggle with empathy, leading to divisions in the family and tensions with friends. All of a sudden someone who raised you or who you worked with at a job for years will just not care about you or how their words may hurt you.

• With this loss of emotional control comes less control over impulses, resulting in addictive behavior such as gambling, drug addictions, and excessive social media use. They may lose themselves in extreme political ideologies, the deceptions of con artists, or an embrace of a religious fundamentalism totally apart to what you previously knew of them.

• A growing mistrust of people, a degree of paranoia, and thus a tendency toward conspiracy theories. All of a sudden someone you once knew as a skeptical, thoughtful, smart person will now have lost their ability to weigh evidence rationally and buy into all sorts of strange ideas.

• An inability to adapt to new technologies or circumstances in life.
  

Now you may look at this list and think as I did initially, "oh, those are just signs of growing old. All sorts of people get like this when they get older."

I thought that at first too when it was just a couple older men. Now that I've seen it more, including in women, I'm growing more suspicious. It simply does not make sense at all to see such stark changes on this level across so many people and for these shifts to all appear so similar across those who are otherwise very different. And it isn't a partisan thing either, I've seen it in both left-wing and right-wing aging boomers and silent generation people.

And this isn’t just me either. When I started seeing these changes emerge in older people I asked others about what they were seeing too in their loved ones and they confirmed observing strikingly similar changes.

So what could be going on here? Here's a theory that I'm considering and how it might help explain the strangeness that American politics has descended into the last 20 years.

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So here's a really strange historical phenomenon that I heard about a few years ago but didn't put a whole lot of stock in because it seemed like just a theory. However, since it was cited approvingly in The Singularity is Nearer—the new book from Ray scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil that I just finished—I'm thinking about it more seriously now.

The “lead-crime hypothesis” is an attempt to explain the sudden drop in violent crime which occurred in countries across the world, all of which had different cultures and crime policies, in the 1990s. Scientists have theorized that the removal of lead paint from gasoline which began in the 1970s meant that the children born then were exposed to less lead than those born previously. Thus, the developmental effects of early lead poisoning had less of an impact on those growing up in the 1970s and even less on Xennials and Millennials in the 1980s and 1990s. Likewise, those born in the 1910s through early 1930s would not have gotten anywhere near the lead exposure as those born in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Here is a video that explains this quickly with charts:

Now, it's important to keep in mind here that lead paint and lead gasoline would not have left a uniform impact for all born during these decades. Some people would have gotten a much higher dose for a longer time than others, particularly those living in places with a whole lot of cars, painted buildings and industrial pollution like in cities such as New York. Perhaps those who grew up in that sad city during the 1940s and 1950s got the highest dosage of poison for any Americans.

Now, let's consider what the symptoms are of those with lead poisoning:

• Cognitive impairment

• Behavioral and emotional issues including aggression and anxiety

• Impulse control disrupting social relationships

• Mental health problems surfacing later in life

• Reduced bone health since lead accumulated in the bones will start to release as the bones get weaker and lose mass

• High blood pressure, heart disease, Kidney damage

• Immune system challenges

See any parallels here between lead poisoning and the personality changes that I've described seeing in recent years?

So here's a hypothesis to consider: what if the common expression many have today about the country "losing its mind" or people seemingly going crazy in old age, embracing strange beliefs they would have rejected just shortly ago, is a literal, physical, scientific phenomenon?

What if a key part of the reason why we seemingly cannot reason with some older Boomers and “younger” Silent Generation elders is because the poison their bodies absorbed for decades of their youth is now reemerging as their bones decay, releasing more into their brains, causing their emotions to shoot up and their IQ to start dropping down?

Now, this should, of course, go without saying, but this is certainly not a total phenomenon which will impact everyone of these ages. I suspect that mass numbers of boomers are going to be fine, that they simply did not get as much lead as others and/or the impact of aging on their body is not going to be the same as others. This certainly hasn't happened to everyone I know this age.

So let's assume a conservative estimate then. What if the sorts of effects that I've seen are only going to happen to perhaps 15-20% of Boomers? That’s 10.5-14 million people. Maybe this will only manifest in a minority of this generation. Maybe that is among the reasons why it's not being noticed yet. One could attribute these various symptoms to any number of causes from an already well-known disease to simply a bad combination of medications. And doctors are certainly thus more likely to diagnose the problems as something else that they’ve grown more accustomed to seeing over their careers.

So even if this is going to happen to only a minority of people, that is still going to have a massive cultural impact, as it may have a pretty huge personal effect on those of us seeing these personality changes in loved ones and once-respected colleagues.

And further, the cultural and political impact here may be larger if we factor in that those who grew up in huge cities may have been impacted more than those in rural or suburban areas. These symptoms are likely to more greatly impact those born and raised in the Eastern corridor of New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington D.C. So, in other words, much of the so-called "elite" running America today.

If this is really the root of the cultural problem we're seeing now in America, that the so-called "grown-ups in the room” have started reverting back to teenager-level emotional and intellectual maturity, what can be done?

Not a fucking thing.

Have you ever tried explaining to an older person that their mental faculties are now in decline and they are not thinking rationally about something?

Good fucking luck with that.

It’s never really worked for previous generations to try and deliver that painful truth to their loved ones and it's going to be even worse over the next decade. The mental deterioration tendencies will happen sooner with old people today and will become worse. But they and most in their family will not prepare for it—maybe not even notice when it's happening—and by the time the symptoms have grown too severe no one can ignore them, it may be too late to intervene. The degeneration could have progressed too far.

But maybe I’m wrong about all this. Certainly we’d need plenty of studies and peer-reviewed research to really know if something like this was happening. And how many years might that take? And how long to then figure out treatments? In the meantime this problem is likely to just get worse as more people born in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s get older.

And so I’m going to keep studying it more, thankfully now with artificial intelligence’s aid, a tool which has really accelerated the research. Hopefully by the time my brain starts to fall apart further from some unknown poison we’ve all swallowed daily for decades, the robots will be advanced enough to compensate.

So, absent adequate scientific evidence to know for sure yet, all I can advocate is this: watch your aging family, friends, and colleagues. If they all of a sudden start to act akin to the symptoms above that I’ve described, give them a bit more grace than you otherwise would. They are no longer the person you once knew.

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