I’m barely back from a tour of Australia
sponsored by EveryAGE Counts, their terrific national anti-ageism campaign. It
was fascinating to look from another continent at how views on age and age bias
are changing around the world.

While I was in Oz, the #OKBoomer meme
broke the internet—ageland’s little corner of it, at least. One accelerant was the
use of the phrase in Parliament by a young New Zealand politician, Chloë
Swarbrick, to rebut an older colleagues after the man heckled her during a
speech about the climate crisis. As Swarbrick explained in a subsequent
essay in the Guardian, the remark was an “off-the-cuff, albeit symbolic of
the collective exhaustion of multiple generations set to inherit
ever-amplifying problems in an ever-diminishing window of time.”

Every generation points fingers at the
one that came before it and finds fault with the generation that follows (“kids
these days”). But young people are coming of age at a time of profound uncertainty,
in anxious times we look for scapegoats, and they do have it harder than their parents did. I was born in 1952, right
in the middle of the bulge in the proverbial python. Youngers have many reasons
to envy my generation’s extreme demographic good fortune, and it is tempting to
frame us as the enemy. The song
that started it all described boomers as racist, fascist Trump supporters
with bad hair. It’s tempting to rise to that hateful bait—ageism cuts both
ways—or to go on the defensive. Then everyone loses, and the planet smolders. Bushfires
destroyed millions of acres during my few weeks in Australia.

The old are not the enemy and age is not the issue. As historian Holly Scott pointed out in the Washington Post, the problem with #OKBoomer is that “generational divides distract from deeper questions of power.” And privilege. The issue is inequality, which does not discriminate by age. What stands between us and a more equitable world are the structures and systems that benefit from oppression—racism, sexism, ageism and all the rest—because prejudice pits us against each other in order to maintain the status quo. Like auto workers in the US competing against auto workers in Mexico instead of organizing for better wages, pitting young against old is a time-honored tactic used to divide people who might otherwise unite to change things.

OK,
boomers: it’s time to reach across the “generational divide,” itself a myth promoted
by the mainstream media. It’s time to really listen to what youngers have to
say and figure out how to work together. It’s time to act like ancestors—because
the stakes have never been higher.

This guest post is by Barbara Lynn Kail, Associate Professor at Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service. She has taught social welfare policy for over 20 years there.  She also currently collaborates with Perre Tarres Faculty of Social Education and Social Work in Barcelona. This permits her to follow another passion, the antiageism movement and current developments in Spain.  Please send any questions or comments to her at kail@fordham.edu.

Generation Z’ers, could I please have a few minutes of your time. 

I’ve only recently become aware of the term “OK Boomer,” after reading an article in the Style section of the New York Times.

Both our generations seem to be engaging in the worst aspects of ageism. In fact, “ok boomer” seems to have polarized us even further.  One radio host compared it to the n-word, while the New York Post asks why Gen Z hates Boomers.  Is this, as the New York Times says, a declaration of war?

You rightly protest that members of my generation are :

• Destroying the world as we know it with our environmental policies.
• Using money and power to maintain the status quo and a privileged position.
• Hurting future generations through selfishness and short-sightedness.
• Not to be trusted.

In short, we Boomers just don’t “get it.” 

Well, these accusations sound really familiar.  As a Boomer, I vividly recall charging my parents’ generation with :

• Destroying the world with nuclear bombs and our foreign policy in Viet Nam.  We are on the eve of destruction!
• Using blatant racism and sexism  to ensure those who had money and  power held on to it…
• at the expense of our generation and future generations – the Greatest Generation was not so great.
• Breaking our trust… anyone over thirty!

I too engaged in gross generalizations, and Mom and Dad were never going to “get it.” 

Boomers, at least some of us, may honestly “get” where you Gen Z'ers are coming from.  In many respects your concerns are my concerns and have been since I was a teenager.  Engaging in wholesale characterizations of each generation causes us to miss an opportunity to join forces.  Just for starters – we can offer experience in grass roots organizing and building a social movement;  you have honed the use of social media to a fine art.  Recognizing the destructiveness of ageism could go a long way. Together, we could focus our efforts far more effectively and fight those of any generation who are afraid of change and revel in a status quo that is truly not sustainable.

Please tell me, ok boomer!

The New York Times devoted much of this
week’s Sunday Opinion section to a staggeringly ageist article, “Out With the Old, In With the Young” by Astra Taylor, which blames “young
people’s inability to effect change” on a “hoary establishment.” As I’ve explained
in the Guardian (How did old people become political
enemies of the young?),
pitting old against young is wrong-headed for countless reasons.

Seeing the New York Times embrace this line of thinking is distressing; seeing a progressive activist like Taylor fall into the trap is even more so. Most younger lefties, of whom Taylor is among the most eloquent, don’t seem to take ageism seriously, perhaps because they have yet to acknowledge their own internalized bias. As I see it, hitching age to the intersectional sled, so to speak, is critically important if we are to join forces against all the problems facing the planet today.  I'd love to have a public conversation about it.

Here’s my Letter to the Editor:

It’s true that older people have more power and millennials too little. Likewise, men have more power than women, and white people more than people of color. The driver of this inequity, however, is not age, or race, or gender. The fundamental driver is capitalism, which perpetuates itself by privileging one group over another.

Those in power are mostly older, male, and white because they benefit from racism, sexism, patriarchy, and all the other mechanisms that disempower the rest of us. It is not because they’re old. Likewise, their priorities are a function of their privilege and the ideology that sustains it—not their age. Class, gender, and race all predict voting behavior better than age does.

Yes, we should absolutely lower the voting age and further enfranchise younger people, but frame these measures as pro-equity, not anti-old. Prejudice pits us against each other, and ageism is no exception. In a world riven by deep divisions of class, race, and gender, we cannot afford to add age to the mix.

* * *

For a more detailed analysis of Taylor's "logically flawed and stunningly ageist article," read this post in Yo, Is This Ageist? by my very smart colleague and policy wonk, Paul Kleyman,