Baby Boomers, Here's What's Coming Next

Welcome, Baby Boomers. In another year or two you're going to start retiring and joining us old folks. You better get ready. After all these decades of being the toast of the town, the biggest-ever generation to whom attention must be paid, you're about to become passé.

Or not.

For generations, elders in America have been treated the way you used to treat that kid in your class who was just a little smaller or weaker, a little different. We've been dissed as unattractive, unproductive, unequal, and decidedly uncool.


You may do somewhat better, partly because of your sheer size. There will be almost twice as many people 65 and over strolling the sidewalks and filling up the supermarket aisles a couple of decades from now. You'll also be healthier than we are, with more political and economic clout.

On the other hand, you might actually encounter an increase in age bias – when the rest of the country realizes what it's costing them to provide all of you with pensions and health care.

I like to think our generation has made some progress toward overcoming ageism, at least with the image-makers: More and more older heroes storm through today's detective novels, while growing numbers of older actors play romantic and/or action roles, people like Harrison Ford (67), Diane Keaton (63), and Clint Eastwood (79). Those gray-haired lovebirds in the Cialis ads bear little resemblance to Ma and Pa Kettle.

Still, studies of the media have found that the more television people watch over the course of their lives, the more negative their feelings about aging.

Scientific research as to the current state of ageism overall is limited, but experts like Robert N. Butler, the pioneering gerontologist, and Erdman Palmore, a Duke University authority on the topic, suspect there has been some small improvement. At the same time, they warn that age discrimination remains an all-pervasive, destructive presence in the American culture.

Most of you Boomers are too young to have experienced age bias, but you will. It keeps you from getting jobs, or keeping one. It leads doctors to withhold or modify treatment according to your age instead of your particular condition. Salespeople look past you. You're ushered to inferior seats in restaurants. Simply because your appearance identifies you as someone who has lived a significant number of years, you're penalized, patronized, and ignored.

Age discrimination takes many forms. I have an older friend who bridles when a bus driver or a merchant addresses her as "young lady." They think they're offering a pleasantry, she says, "but what they're really doing is putting down the way I am." In general, ageism affects women fare far worse than men.

A few months ago, I heard a couple of guys on National Public Radio having a lot of fun with General Motors because its first new, long-gestating model after emerging from bankruptcy turned out to be a Buick. Why in the world would the company lead off with a brand for old people, the NPR pair wondered, and did it come with a built-in dialysis machine?

What a hoot! Obviously, any car identified with old people was fair game for a joke, just like old people themselves. I'd been driving Buicks much of my life, and until then I never realized there was anything funny about them – or about me at the wheel – or about dialysis, for that matter.

Ageism is serious business for every generation, you Boomers included. The culture plants feelings of fear and disgust about getting old in our children's psyches. They grow up to waste untold hours in front of mirrors looking for gray hairs or slack skin and billions of dollars a year on anti-aging cosmetics and cosmetic surgery.

Inevitably, ageism influences the way they treat old people; eventually, they direct that bias against themselves. As older men and women, they're embarrassed by their infirmities, their forgetfulness, their diminished libido. They're ashamed of who they are.

And then ageism exacts a final toll. According to a study by Becca Levy, a Yale University professor, people with a negative view of aging when young live an average of 7.5 fewer years than those with a more positive view.

In historic terms, ageism is a latecomer. Our Puritan founders believed long life was a gift from God. The elderly were to be revered and their advice sought. And nobody put down old people when we were an agricultural society and they owned the land. All that began to change when secular individualism replaced religious belief and the industrial revolution replaced the farm.

Some of those early good feelings toward the elderly still linger, of course. We're parents and grandparents, after all. There's love involved. In your everyday dealings, you don't set out to insult or injure us old folks. Yet we end up being patronized, rejected, and blatantly discriminated against.

Will you Boomers be able to lessen age bias and uproot the ugly image of old people embedded in our culture. Erdman Palmore thinks it's possible. "It's a generation that's used to standing up for its rights and standing up for minority groups," he says.

Christie Brinkley thinks so, too. "Thank heavens for Baby Boomers," the 55-year-old super model told ET earlier this year. "Ageism is going by the wayside now." I sure hope she's right.