Great Expectations

 Betty White was very close to one hundred years old when she died. Just another couple weeks longer, and she would have made it to a century. The comedy legend passed away on New Year's Eve 2021. Her birthday was January 17. There was quite a bit of hoopla leading up to what became essentially a non-event. Please understand that I mean this as no slight to Ms. White. I remember watching her on Password with her husband, host Allen Ludden. They were quite the pair. Allen went to that big TV studio in the sky in 1981, and in all those years after Betty never remarried. 

But she didn't last until one hundred. Bob Hope did. So did George Burns. And, as comedian Bobcat Goldthwait once observed, they kept getting funnier every minute. Mister Bobcat meant that sarcastically, but the argument might be made that Betty White experienced a renaissance in her career as she grew older, rather than simply riding on the wave that is, "Really? Almost one hundred?" Her last film role was the voice of the owner of the eponymous animated dog, Trouble, in 2019. 

I could go on and on here, but I am actually creeping toward a potentially larger point. There were those who believed that these United States might not last until its one hundredth birthday. Happily, the skeptics were wrong, admitting the great state of Colorado to that union in 1876, marking it as The Centennial State. A hundred years after that, even as the wounds of Watergate and the war in Vietnam were still healing, America celebrated its two hundredth anniversary with parades and celebrations and collectible quarters which are now worth (checks notes) twenty-five cents. 

And now we find ourselves on the brink of our semiquincentennial, a word that had to be cobbled together to pump up the importance of the pending event. Two hundred fifty years is quite a run: two and a half Betty Whites. Here's the thing: Wouldn't it be awful if we didn't manage to hang on that long? A catastrophic event of some stripe that brought about the end of our great republic? The loss in swag sales alone would be devastating, while the great nations of Europe might cough and say something along the lines of, "What a pity. And so young." 

World War. Economic Collapse. Civil War. These were the kind of scenarios that used to be the stuff of dystopian science fiction novels. Now they're all on the board as we teeter toward our two hundred fiftieth birthday. 

Or maybe we'll just die peacefully in our sleep after a prolonged Trump.