LET’S CALL IT A DRAW
The relationships between different generations are marked by conflict and social friction – even though none could exist without the other. So what a better time to find peace than in a pandemic?
Even before Covid two important factors – increasing life expectancy and climate change – were fomenting antagonism between the generations. This kind of tussle has existed since the dawn of the time, largely driven by animalistic instincts, with the young people in the herd telling the old: “Make way, we’re coming through!”
Seasoned pensioners, enjoying good health and high spirits long into retirement, have become the subject of fretful calculations on the sustainability of welfare. The swarms of charter flights packed with senior citizens flocking to the Caribbean, the Red Sea or the Mediterranean represent some of the most lucrative developments of the consumer age. But for many authorities, greater longevity equates to a spiralling economic burden. Youth unemployment and underemployment hardly help to fund the various welfare services, whose budgets are increasingly vulnerable. At the same time, welfare expenses are rising because the elderly are living longer. But since old age awaits us all, even the most cynical would be advised to hope this latter trend continues.
In many Western countries, the objective inequality between young and old is a perplexing issue for trade unions and political parties. The old enjoy privileges, often won in fierce labour struggles, while the young will have to cope with an uncertain future plagued with economic instability and welfare cuts. There is a real danger that “rich and old” and “poor and young” could become standard binomial categories.
Consider climate change, and the image of insatiable, short-sighted baby boomers – consumers of the planet at the expense of their children and grandchildren – is an all too easy target for young environmentalists. “Thanks, boomers, you’ve lived high on the hog and left us to wash the dishes.” Millions of young people like Greta Thunberg are asking adults to consider the true price tag that accompanies unfettered economic growth.
And then along came Covid. It seems purpose-built to open a new, diabolical front in the struggle between old and young. It’s a virus that walks on the legs of the young, taking advantage of their energetic sociality, but which mainly kills the old. Unlike the great plagues of the past, today the spreaders are not exposed to the same dangers as the victims. In most cases the spreaders are unsuspected, healthy grandchildren who, in 99 per cent of cases, may suffer from little more than a passing infection. Yet they risk killing off their grandparents by kissing them goodnight.
This would be the ideal subject for a dystopian novel or a fantasy series of refined barbarity, were it not horribly true.
In Italy, with the outbreak of the second wave last autumn, there were some striking signs of this lurking war between generations. Alarmed petitions and collections of signatures expressed opposing recriminations backed up by more or less authoritative complaints. On one hand, the young lamented being forced into seclusion, deprived of their schooling and social life because of rules and laws custom-made for the elderly. On the other, the old were shocked by the recklessness of the young, by the crowded summer discotheques (which also happened to be full of couples in andropause and menopause), and by the nonchalant continuation of “life as usual” that is so typical of our early years, when hormones, rather than established authority, dictate the structure of individual and social life.
Which brings us to hormones. Beyond the unpleasant accusations, mutual intolerance and bad habits, it is hormones that suggest a point of objectivity in this ongoing discussion. Old age and youth have different needs leading to different desires and habits. Social distancing and isolation weigh less on those who have already been able to indulge themselves to excess. Those who are just making their entrance onto the stage of life, meanwhile, feel the need to live it up, to satiate their desire for fulfillment. In the current socio-medical situation, it’s not easy to reconcile the frenzy of youth and the safety of old people. This is not because of selfishness or shallowness, but because life has an invincible apathy that is often deaf and blind. And in times of contagion, this apathy is wholly to the detriment of the old and their frailty.
The disparity of risk between old and young is one of the inevitable factors in the Covid equation. It’s as natural as the transmission from bat to man (from beast to beast); or the virus’s necessity to use the bodies of others to live and multiply, and its tendency to do it in a transnational and classless way (the virus doesn’t give a hoot about politics). It’s also as natural as the fright and suffering caused by sickness and death; or the objective fact that the older among us (myself included, as I approach my 70s) are closer to death than youngsters, and less resistant to this and other viral or bacterial attacks.
I’m not suggesting we should absolve those who don’t care about the health measures and go around without a mask. Nor do I think we should acquit the many governments that have underestimated the virus and failed to enforce the necessary precautions, especially the most unpopular ones. I’m not a fatalist. Rather, I am saying that the very inevitability of Covid (and of pain and death) makes the avoidable mistakes we commit more serious and inadmissible. One of these errors – apart from some macroscopic healthcare failings, and an intolerably widespread difference in care and protection depending on one’s income – is the obsession with finding easy explanations. Answers that are so facile they let us simply erase the evil once a culprit has been identified.
That’s not how it works. Nature, as we’re learning to our cost, consists of a very complicated set of relationships and conflicts. These include the different effects that a coronavirus can have on people’s health depending on their age. This doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to unionise the different age groups – establishing a Youth Union, all school and nightlife, and a Guild of the Elderly, all lockdown and prudence. Defying their hormones, many young people have been dutiful and considerate during lockdowns. And many old people have compensated them well in advance by dipping into their pensions and savings to subsidise their grandchildren’s partying and holidaying. Let’s call it a draw.