It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Old — Elder Rant Part III — Old Folks, the Working Poor
Elder Rant Part III
This will be short. Robert Reich, whom I greatly admire, has posted a piece that has permeated my consciousness by way of every media outlet I so much as glance at. He posits that the impoverished children of America have been abandoned, that the country has chosen to save its elderly instead of its youth. A choice, Reich suggests, that should be reversed.
To be fair, the conclusion he draws is that poverty in America is pervasive, and we as a society have done little to avert it. With that I agree. But there is a prevalent notion out there in the chatty, arrogant world of social media and misinformation that old people are draining America’s resources, that old people are irrelevant and costly, that old people deserve derision and worse.
SNL’s Colin Jost, the god of Gen-X-Z’s idolatry, quipped last week that “Joe Biden’s approval rating has dropped to 33%. . . lower than the approval rating for Sonic the Hedgehog II”. He then went on to make demean the president, making fun of foibles clearly aimed at ridiculing the old man’s age. I love a good joke as much as anyone, and I am certainly capable of self-deprecation, especially when it comes to the vagaries of my aging, but Jost’s comments are symptomatic of a lack of respect, a diminution of my entire age group. They are meant to bite, to tear at the fabric of trust in a president they view as too old to function.
What is laughable about that returns me to Robert Reich’s notion that the elderly have been “rescued from poverty and not our children.”
There are certainly people of my age and especially of my academic background who are much better off than I am. I admit that I have done less than I should have to pursue the almighty dollar and have allowed myself to be diverted to jobs and self-devaluation that have kept me less than solvent in my old age.
I am, however, far more representative of my age group than Robert Reich would have you believe. Like millions of other old gold Americans, I am still working. And, in fact, I am working now more than I ever did, and I love my work. But I would love the freedom to slow down, to sit back and concentrate on the flow of words straining at my brain, wanting to be written in the books I have been putting off since I first headed out to work to support myself at age 18. I can’t. I still work at jobs that I would not be doing anymore were it not for financial need.
In 1938, child labor laws prohibited children from being exploited in the workplace. They were relegated to schools and home. Their ability to generate income was eradicated. (Unless they were turned into stars of stage and screen . . . and today of tiktok and youtube.) In short, if America could still send its children out to work, it would, and children would be in the same boat as their elderly counterparts. I’m not suggesting we should go back to those bad old days.
I’m just sayin’.