Old people have never been so powerful — or, now, so vulnerable. Our new issue is about long lives, including MarkHarrisNYC on our fragile gerontocracy
Bill Streiber, 84, seeing his son through the window at the Solheim Senior Community in Los Angeles, California, on May 21, 2020. Photo: Art Streiber Each day’s headlines jolt us with the same unnerving reality: There has never, in the history of the Republic, been a stranger time to be old. We live in a kind of gerontocracy that feels both accidental and deeply entrenched.
The resentment that churns just beneath the surface of all the urgent, let’s-get-moving-again platitudes about how nobody lives forever is not, of course, new. Every set of fresh arrivals in the workforce has felt, at some point, that older people are obstinately refusing to make room for them, their ideas, and their priorities . Today, there are more of those human blockades than ever: People live even longer, and the boomers — there are so, so many of them.
However, almost all of the older people I interviewed were fully functioning, eager and engaged citizens of the world, and many of them seemed to possess a power that the younger among us do not, an ability to toggle easily from you-are-there recollections of an often decades-distant past to full connection to that day’s news. More than that, they were interested.