There are still a few people around playing the inter-generational blame game, although I am relieved to see it has dropped way down. The horrendous ‘bye-boomer’ meme earlier in the pandemic seems to have disappeared, and I’m not seeing regular ok boomer dismissals online.
There are a few people who don’t seem to get it, including one prominent left wing blogger I am not linking to but the gist of which is that millennials and younger are locked down with severe restrictions to save boomer lives and given how boomers have fucked everything up, they should remember this when it’s all over. Assuming they’re not dead I guess. Reading accounts from medical staff in Italy and the US of the conditions under which people are dying tells me immediately that we have to stop giving older people grief.
It’s not hard to react and counter with tales of all the stupid shit some young people are doing right now or how millennials don’t vote out austerity goverments, but that just keeps us in the cul de sac of political impotence against neoliberalism.
Instead,
Recently I tweeted this,
I miss my old people something fierce. When I was growing up I spent a lot of time around old people, my grandparents and their friends and extended family. They weren’t boomers of course, the boomers were still in their 20s and 30s, millennial-esque. All those old people are gone now and the boomers have taken their place. The first boomers are in their mid-70s, and I am going to miss them something fierce when they are gone too.
Mainstream society treats old people pretty badly in many ways. Ageism is real, and institutional ageism is not well discussed in political circles. I contrast this with Māori and other cultures who value their old people highly, because aroha, and because older people hold institutional wisdom that cultures need to survive and be well. Part of how humans evolved was because we had older people to help with raising kids and tending to the tribe.
For many of us it is clear that there is no going back to how things were, the coronavirus has changed everything. Neoliberalism has been momentarily stopped in its tracks, and we just demonstrated in a few short months that if we want to, when it’s actually important to us, we can drastically reduce GHG emissions.
What we do next matters. We’re not going back, but what we are going forward into isn’t set in stone. We have some choices here, and I’m hoping that over the next four weeks we can have a wide discussion about what those choices are and where we want to go. The potential for change is here, in our hands, in a way I’ve not experienced in 50 odd years.
How do we want to function collectively as a society? If socialists, progressives, left wingers want to talk about how our values and politics are good and useful right now, then we have to get this stuff right. Practice what we preach and actively create the society based in kindness and connection we say we want, here and now. This is no longer theoretical nor political aspiration. We are in the time when we get to make it real.
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