If youth is wasted on the young, then old age is wasted on the elderly.
Nobody wants to get old, except maybe someone young or middle-aged who has a life-threatening illness. Then getting old looks like a luxury. Having good health and money in old age removes some of the dread but invites criticism: “Oh, you’re spending your children’s inheritance.”
Fear and hatred of old age is so ingrained in us we accept it without thinking. Within an hour of the crash at the Reno Air Races last week, the finger pointing started: Oldest pilot, oldest plane.
Yes, 74 seems kind of old for a pilot, but by all accounts he was a healthy, fit old man. And his plane was virtually rebuilt. News Web sites that listed other air show crashes did not include the ages of the pilots involved. As it turns out, mechanical failure appears to be the cause in the Reno crash.
We’ve become as hypersensitive about age as we are about race and ethnicity. There’s a difference though: As long as we’re alive, our ages change. Go ahead and bash someone because they’re older than you are. Someday you’ll choke on those words, and sooner than you think. One of the wisest lines ever sung in a rock song was written by Robbie Robertson and Aaron Neville: “We grow up so slowly and grow old so fast.” (From “What About Now.”)
There have always been generational conflicts. What has changed, beginning with the parents of Baby Boomers, is that many of the parents were eager to acquiesce to their children’s generation, even imitate them or seek their approval.
It’s only gotten worse, with the now-aging Boomer generation acting worshipful towards teenagers, especially those who display technological skills, as if that equates to superior human qualities. New York Times editor Bill Keller nailed it several months ago when he wrote about Twitter and referred to “aging academics who stoke their charisma by overpraising every novelty. …”
I used to work for an editor (a member of the Boomer generation) who regularly sent out a newsroom-wide email inviting 20-somethings to meet him for lunch. The editor could have handled this privately, simply asking to lunch staff members who appeared to be in their 20s. His newsroom-wide email divided employees, but it allowed him to burnish his brand as an editor who appealed to youth.
Later when one of his prized 20-somethings turned 30, this editor started holding separate lunches for 30-somethings. Some of those 30-somethings are now pushing 40. And despite the media’s best efforts to sell youth-related merchandise, 40 is not the new 30. The way things are going, 40 might be the new 50. And 50? Better not find yourself unemployed.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof last month commented on the difficulty in finding work in the current economy and lumped together as “marginal people” ex-felons and those with “a bit of gray hair.”
Among the people who commented on his column was a 60-year-old Denver, Colo., woman with a PhD in linguistics, a Master’s degree in computer science and 20 years of tech leadership positions. “I can’t get a job because I can’t lift a 50-pound bag of fertilizer at Walmart. … You can file this under old women are useless.”
A woman in New York replied and endorsed the May 25th suicide of a 55-year-old San Francisco woman who hadn’t worked since 2008 and jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. “Her decision was one hundred percent sane.”
Against this backdrop, politicians are ganging up on Social Security. Apparently it is now an “entitlement” and regarded by some as a form of welfare, even though it is a fund that American employees and employers pay into under the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA). The money is supposed to go into an insurance trust fund.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, among other Republicans who are running for president, dismisses Social Security as a Ponzi scheme, as if it’s somehow unseemly to even expect a payout. If he were truly concerned about the Social Security fund providing for future generations, he would want to strengthen it – not get rid of it as if it were a crime.
The Social Security system needs adjustments to accommodate the times, and some proposals are worthy of consideration – cutting benefits to wealthy retirees; adjusting the cost of living increase; requiring people earning $250,000 a year or more to pay Social Security taxes on their full salaries.
That latter proposal has been automatically rejected by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) who opposes any tax increase. (He conveniently forgets that his hero, Ronald Reagan, allowed Social Security payments to become taxable under the IRS code.)
Boehner prefers raising the retirement age to 70. It is already due to go up to 67 in 2022.
So here’s what Americans of all ages have to look forward to: Plan on working longer in a culture that increasingly has no use for old people and where elderhood is starting earlier.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
I hope you’re wrong, but I’ m afraid you might be right.
What I’ve noticed is how people in their 20s, the millenial generation its known as, will bash “baby boomers.” This pas t summer, oneof the interns in my office, a young woman, said more than once, “We’re having to fix all the problems you created.” By “we” she meant her generation and by you she met the “boomers.”
I told her I wasn’t a boomer. I belong to the later generation, the X generation. My wife told me that shouldn’t be the issue. The generations shouldn’t be blaming each other. Everybody’s got problems. I blame the media for making everyone so age conscious and labeling everyone. Kinda like that editor you wrote about.