Life Expectancy.

 I'm sixty-five years old.  

I retired early at 62.  My life expectancy then, as a white female in the USA, was 81.2 years or almost 20 years left to go.

If I had retired at 65, I could have expected 15 years---covid, opioid crisis, whatever dropped expectancy. But wait, there is more, since I'm in Oklahoma, it actually is only 78.6 for a white female, about 13 years--and that was figured before the pandemic.

Reality is, neither statistic is going to kill me--unless I catch Covid and die of it, or start taking opiates and become addicted, I'll die the same time I would have no matter what.

So what is all this life expectancy stuff.

It's statistics.

Statistics help us to see the big picture.  They show us where we are progressing, where we are failing and how we compare to other places on those same things.  But they are not a simple picture---call them abstract art---because to understand the stats, you have to dig around and find the causes of the changes.

In 1860, life expectancy was 39.1 but  in 1865 it 35.1.  

What happened?  Short answer--the Civil War.  But it is complicated as those statistics may not include anyone in the country but white people. (And there were other people here, there always have been--at least since written history in this country and we have evidence of people here more than 20,000 years ago).  

While many people died of the war, many also died of the consequences of war, broken supply chains, farms burned or left fallow because of where they were or who was not around to care for the farm--so hunger thrived.  And hate thrived.  Never underestimate the ability of hate to kill people.

Life expectancy has seldom gone down, it takes big things, but some big things really make a difference---Before the USA, Bubonic plague dropped us tremendously, but after in the USA, it has happened seldom enough.

In 1915, life expectancy was 54.14, by 1920, only 53.22.  That was a combination of WWI and the Spanish Flu pandemic.  There were 117,465 deaths of military and nonmilitary personnel in WWI.

The flu pandemic killed 675,000 during that same time period.  The Population at that time was less than 107 Million.

Right now, our life expectancy in this country is being affected by Covid-19, gun violence, climate change, no access to healthcare, no access to abortion/reproductive care, poor education, food deserts, homelessness, income inequality and hate.

What are you and your loved ones being affected by?

Life expectancy in years - USAFacts

List of U.S. states and territories by life expectancy - Wikipedia

• United States: life expectancy 1860-2020 | Statista

How Many Americans Died in WW1? - History (historyonthenet.com)

Covid overtakes 1918 Spanish flu as deadliest disease in U.S. history (statnews.com)