A DANGEROUS GENERATION GAP

I’m tired of hearing accusations by the elderly and by Millenials that the other group is hogging all the resources. My group (I am 80) is the frequent target of attacks on “entitlements.” Having paid for Social Security and Medicare for all my working years, I do feel entitled to use them now that I need them. They are not welfare! I’m also concerned about medical insurance in general. When I was young, healthy, and childless, I paid premiums that benefited the elderly, the sick, and families. How dare younger people object to helping me now?

Millenials have their own financial problems, of course. Tuition, even at state universities, is beyond the reach of many families now. (My family was extremely poor, but they managed somehow to put me through an excellent private college back in the fifties.) Competition is fierce for jobs that enable even well-educated young people to earn enough to buy homes and start families. For those with little formal education, life can be very hard.

It may seem at first that the divisions between the elderly and the young are simply a result of a shortage of resources.  Not everyone can have a bigger “piece of the pie.” However, the United States seems to have enough money to cut income taxes for wealthy individuals and corporations, to spend billions of dollars on military adventures, even to build an enormous wall between our country and Mexico.

How has the split between the “haves” and “have-nots” grown so wide? When I was a child, there certainly were wealthy and poor people, but there was an enormous middle class that had comfortable but unostentatious homes, enough food, and access to good educations. Today, in driving our RV around the country, I've seen huge areas where people are living in shacks or in tents under bridges, and other areas (often surrounded by high walls with locked gates) where elaborate homes are crowded together. What I think of as a middle-class home is quite rare.

In the years after World War II, many affordable suburban communities appeared, allowing returning G.I.’s to achieve what was then considered the American Dream—a house with two or three bedrooms, one or two bathrooms, and a small yard. (I have lived in both Park Forest and Daly City; those communities are still very livable today.)

Today, developers instead construct gated communities of very expensive homes that have few of the parks and other assets families need. They remind me of medieval fortresses.

On the other hand, our growing homeless population (including some of the Millenials and some of the elderly) cannot find decent places to live. People who have graduated from college and just entered the work force may be crammed into apartments or houses with many others; old people may end up in substandard nursing homes.

A country that can spend billions of dollars on a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants could invest much more on simple affordable housing, tuition grants, retirement communities, lower cost medical care, and other things that would benefit all age groups. The growing resentment between the elderly and the young is unnecessary, and we need to work together instead. We must resist our common enemy.