The Mighty Mighty Godking imagines a commencement address for coffin dodgers, giving old people some of their own medicine in the form of unwanted advice. The key paragraph is the following
Rich people are generally old people; even well-off people are generally old people. And old people look out for old people, and unfortunately over the past twenty or so years the number of old people has been increasing steadily, which means that the interests of old people dominate over the interests of young people, who just have to eventually take care of the old people. I mean – global warming! We all agreed that that was important, right? And then suddenly rich people – who were also old people – all decided it really wasn’t that important any more, and lectured us all about how the economy demanded that we pretend climate change wasn’t happening. (The economy demands a lot of things. Like tax cuts for rich people – who are, once again, mostly old people.) And when the economy gets better, it doesn’t get better for young people. The story of unemployment in every first world country right now is the same: young people are unemployed at vastly greater rates than old people, with rates double or triple the general unemployment rate.
Most rich people might be old, but most old people aren’t rich. While it is true that younger people are affected more by the current economic crisis, for a lot of elder baby boomers it’s not been a happy time either. MGK’s hypothetical sixty year old, who in his version has had everything going for him would’ve also been eligble for the draft when the war in Vietnam was still ongoing, left university just as the mid-seventies economic depressions (stagflation!) hit, had to suffer years of low to non-existing wage raises in the early eighties in order to safeguard his pension later, be suckered into all kinds of 401(k) schemes that paid out more to the fund managers than to his retirement fund, had hoped to have his house as a nest egg but saw the bottom drop out of the housing market just as he lost his job as well, while the only new job he can find is as greeter at Wal-Mart. And to add insult to injury, he now keeps hearing that social security is broken and needs to be privatised to be saved, when he spent most of the eighties moderating his wage demands to save it…
We shouldn’t really be talking about a generational conflict, of a struggle between old and young people, but rather realise that both generations have been suckered by a small elite of rich people. After the Second World War we had roughly thirty years in which all western countries build up an as fair and equal welfare state as was possible in each country, which in the last thiry years has been steadily attacked by those who saw profit in dismantling it. Talking too much about “old” versus “young” just plays in their hands.
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