Should We Stop Treating Old People Like Garbage?
And if so, how do we do that?
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The recent conversation about Joe Biden was actually two conversations. The explicit conversation — which I engaged in whole-heartedly — was about how when a person’s brain appears to be turning into cotton candy, their job should maybe not involve managing the nuclear triad. And the implicit conversation — which I, like most people, did not engage in at all — was about the role of the elderly in our society. Now that Biden has dropped out, let’s talk about the thing that we were sort of talking about the whole time.
Research shows that most people will become old. Prejudice against the elderly is a strange type of bigotry, because it’s bigotry against a group that all of us aspire to join. I can disparage Australians with gusto (and I do!) because I’ll never be Australian — you could make me drink Fosters and wear Billabong shirts, you could force me to wipe my ass with my hand and become amorous with a sheep, but I’ll never really be Australian.1 But I will — God willing — one day be old. It’s in all of our interest to identify dignified and useful roles for older people.
I think that we fail at this by shunting older people into two categories: 1) Useless, or 2) Still young-acting. This is our binary sorting mechanism, and it sucks. Old people who are deemed useless get warehoused and ignored — we’re half a step away from Soylent Green-ing these folks. Therefore, you can understand why some older people are desperate to act as though they’re still young. It also doesn’t help that we often pretend that being young-at-heart is entirely a choice — is there a more shopworn trope in TV and movies than “old person acting young”? How many times have you seen grannies in cool shades busting a rap, or a sitcom grandpa getting laughs by using the latest slang? It’s a tired enough trope that The Simpsons wrote this joke 30 years ago: