“Based on analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), risks of hospitalizations and deaths [from Covid-19] increase with age. Adults ages 75 or older have 8-13 times higher risk of hospitalizations and 220-630 times higher risk of death compared to adults 18-29 years old. See complete report here.“
That’s from a King County, Washington website (here).
There’s no question that many Americans have greatly resented the lockdowns, mask and social distancing mandates, and restrictions on group gatherings — and ignored or defied them. Most of them are young or middle aged; you don’t see old people with walkers at anti-mask protests. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, even suggested, in Vanity Fair‘s words, that old people should volunteer to die to save the economy (story here).
When Covid-19 first struck, it ravaged nursing homes, and it’s long been common knowledge that it’s far more threatening to the senior citizen community. There’s no question the pandemic has spawned generational resentment, most among young people against old people, a resentment that goes beyond questioning being asked to sacrifice and includes anger at the failures of leadership committed by elders who allowed the pandemic to get out of control (see, e.g., this Newsweek article here).
“We are not in this together, millennials have to take the brunt of the sacrifice in the situation,” a 30-year-old Canadian said. “If you won’t watch out that we don’t end up jobless and poorer, why should we protect you?” (Quoted in the Newsweek article.)
The answer is that the power-wielding generation did watch out for them, and try to keep them from ending up jobless and poor. Congress has appropriated huge sums for unemployment benefits, direct stimulus payments, payments to businesses to keep furloughed employees on their payrolls, and a crash program to develop vaccines to reopen the economy and enable people to return to jobs as soon as possible. In addition, federal and state governments enacted eviction and foreclosure moratoriums to protect people of all ages from losing their homes, but by far the most numerous beneficiaries of these moratoriums will be the young. Most people owning their homes outright are older.
So the argument that the old people who run things in this country haven’t helped its young people isn’t valid.
The pandemic has gotten on people’s nerves. Millions have cabin fever. But it’s deeper than that. Young people feel they’re being robbed of their once-in-a-lifetime chance at youth and the young-and-single social life. They also worry that their career prospects and financial futures have been harmed. These frustrations are understandable. But old people didn’t do that to them. A virus did it to them. Nobody asked for this pandemic.
A generation of writers, Ernest Hemingway among them, made their reputations by giving voice to an earlier, now largely forgotten, “lost generation.” According to Wikipedia (here), these were people “born between 1883 and 1900.” Millions of them, of all countries, were lost on the battlefields of 1914-1918.
If any generation had reason to complain about the folly of their elders, that one did. They didn’t just lose their youth, they lost the countless lives not lived, and within a few short years the survivors were thrust into the conflagration of the Great Depression followed by an even more devastating world war.
The surviving members of this generation presided over the early years of the nuclear age, and they didn’t blow up the world.
America was already divided before Covid-19, although nothing like the divisions that led to the Civil War, and Covid-19 merely added another cause célèbre to the simmering pot. The divisions it created are more partisan than generational; the conflicts are more between science and anti-science, lockdown and reopen, maskers and anti-maskers, than young-vs.-old. Given the vast disparity of severe illnesses and deaths between age groups, the age chasm lurks in the background, but it hasn’t been the main driving force of our societal conflict over the pandemic and its impacts. Today’s fractured politics quickly converted that conflict into a Democrat-vs.-Republican battlefield.
