The real problem with US gerontocracy.
Bear with me on this “out-of-nowhere” point. There’s an interesting phenomena among Boomer-aged Bulgarian immigrants in the U.S. Some have developed a nostalgia for the Communist Bulgaria of their youth, the unjust systems of the 1970s and 1980s. These are people who so desperately wanted to immigrate to America they traded in jobs as engineers, lawyers, doctors and academics to drive cabs or work at Kentucky Fried Chicken in the U.S.
My Boomer-aged parents never went through that. They were not a part of the nomenclatura whose lives were filled with privileges under Communism. And after some “new immigrant” hiccups, they did well in the U.S., my Dad working as an engineer and my mom in travel. But their proximity gives them insight into the phenomenon of their contemporaries’ yearning for the Communism of yore.
“They don’t miss Communism. They miss being 25-years-old,” my Dad bluntly said when I asked him about this.
I try to be careful about ageism. Also, it is truly wild how objectively well many humans are aging now. In my own lifetime, I saw my grandmother age better than my great-grandmother, and my parents age far better then their own parents (Grandma aside) in terms of health, energy, even looks.
The Internet is filled with incredulous content observing that the actresses in the “Golden Girls” were the same age as stars who still read as sexy post-50. J-Lo and Shakira, Angelina Jolie, etc.
I’m sure that Gary, the Golden Bachelor, truly loves Theresa. But in my perfunctory following of that show, I couldn’t help but notice him reject far more beautiful women because they read as older than Theresa, whose hair-style and body could easily belong to a woman decades younger.
But here’s something that I hope is not ageist (and for the record, I’ve not been 25 for 16 years). There are societies that value age: cultures that respect the wisdom of elder statesmen and cultures where it’s normalized to fop off young kids on the grandparents, rather than scramble to pay for childcare. You can literally see this walking down the street in New York. 10 times out of 10, if you see a baby and a caretaker of the same ethnicity, the grandparents are Asian, East Indian, sometimes Eastern European. White American babies are almost always in the company of Black or brown nannies.
Which is a very long way of saying that there are societies that value old age, and America is very much not one of them. We are the land of baby botox. Influencer Kim Kardashian has said that she would eat literal shit if it means looking young. There’s a rich 45-year-old dude who’s gone viral because he takes infusions of his own son’s blood to look younger (as my friend the reporter Danny Gold pointed out once, “I have friends around that age whose blood is 30 percent alcohol and powders who look better than him.” Guilty as charged!).
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