Gerontocracy

Mark Harris had a great article for The Cut about the power and vulnerability of elderly people right now. Below are excerpts.

Each day’s headlines jolt us with the same unnerving reality: There has never, in the history of the Republic, been a stranger time to be old. We live in a kind of gerontocracy that feels both accidental and deeply entrenched.

The futures of all Americans are largely in the hands of people who are entering, or well into, what one of my uncles used to call “the bonus round.” And yet the aged, at the height of their power and disinclined to relax their grip on it — just look at who votes — have also never been more vulnerable.

Almost 60 percent of those who have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. were 75 or older. Almost 80 percent were age 65 or older. Residents of nursing homes or assisted-living facilities have made up as many as half the fatalities in some areas of the country, and the reaction among many people, either by implication or outright declaration, has been, “See? That means most of us have nothing to worry about!”

In the last few months, the elderly population has become prey not only to a lethal pandemic but to the Hobbesian worldview of a group of death-cult politicians and their adherents who have felt free to air their conviction that hurrying Grandma and Grandpa to the end of the conveyor belt may be an acceptable price to pay for a revived economy, not to mention the indifference of a subset of the young and the middle-aged who really want to go out and play and are unconcerned with what they might spread while dunking the basketball in the park or sidewalk drinking.

The medical conditions older Americans manage to live with every day are now airily discussed as “comorbidities” (in other words, they had it coming), the years they have amassed treated as so much demographic bad luck, the vulnerabilities that flesh is heir to dismissed as getting in the way of reopening the economy.

The resentment that churns just beneath the surface of all the urgent, let’s-get-moving-again platitudes about how nobody lives forever is not, of course, new. Every set of fresh arrivals in the workforce has felt, at some point, that older people are obstinately refusing to make room for them, their ideas, and their priorities (and, maybe, their raises). Today, there are more of those human blockades than ever: People live (and work) even longer, and the boomers — there are so, so many of them. The fury and fear of many younger progressives about a core political issue, the imminent destruction of the environment, is frequently shorthanded as cross-generational judgmentalism — “You and your wasted lifetimes of obsessive consumerism ruined the planet for us.”

Many of them view older people as their categorical adversaries — remnants of a neglectful previous administration, in a way, who don’t even have the good grace to stop impeding progress.

And young conservatives, of course, just say the quiet part loud. “You can call me a grandma killer,” chirped one in the course of a Twitter rant about how she was sick of the lockdown and wanted to go out to museums and restaurants and have fun.

This virus continues to rob old people of their futures — futures they are as entitled to invest with hope and energy as anyone else. Because the elderly are both a hardy and a precarious population — one that is depleted every day even as it welcomes new members to its ranks — it has become easy for some people to treat them as both more and less than human; they’re either a population of noble Yodas we can mine for every nugget of gnomic sagacity before we discard them, or they’re obstructions interposed between the idealistic and/or selfish and the things they respectively crave.

“They” are us, only with more miles, more wrinkles, more history, more joint pain, sometimes more money, often more knowledge, almost always more perspective. If we’re very fortunate, one day we will become them, even if, as a 98-year-old neighbor told me a few years ago on his way out for a short walk, “I know what you’re thinking. But believe me, it’s no picnic.”

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