I really wish that there were better communal living options for adults / older adults, especially those of us who don't have (and don't intend to have) children. I wish that "communal homes" weren't so stigmatized and badly taken care of, because honestly? The idea of living in a small apartment around a communal living space where there were lots of other people I could socialize with, play roleplaying games with, cook with, go on outings and errands with... that sounds AWESOME. And if I could start it NOW, as someone who's almost 40, then by the time I reached my older adulthood I've have built these decades-long relationships with people in the community, which would curtail the loneliness A LOT. Alas, "live with your nuclear family" is the default now, and "live with a bunch of other adults in a communal setting" is hugely discriminated against, to the point where it's not even really seen as an option except for the most vulnerable.
@@somecuriosities It's possible -- I don't know all that much about the Epicureans. What I will say is that in "Western" society today, if you even suggest, "I'd like to set up an old folks' home but for people of any age", you'll probably get either weird stares or incredulous laughter, which I think is a crying shame.
@@juliegolick I mean, we're really talking about how you might go about making a kind of commune right? What's to stop a bunch of people getting together and forming a housing association that reconstructed say, a inner city square of flats, into a communal living space?
@@somecuriosities Some friends of mine and I are actually in the process of long-term planning for this right now, actually. We've got four of us who have decided to go in on the communal lifestyle. That said, it would be a lot easier if there were already an organization set up to allow this (like a community living centre) and we didn't need to setup the infrastructure from scratch.
My whole family works in elder abuse prevention and anti-ageism (it’s kind of our thing). This is the first time that I’ve seen a content creator engage with the *entire* definition of ageism in good faith. Thank you.
That's incredible your family is doing this!!! Do you have a website or social media account? I used to work helping disabled adults, which I loved but I was very sick and I actually realized I'm disabled and had a breakdown and no more work since. I'm still healing. I have been laying on acupressure mats for years now and it's the only way I'm alive now. My severe pain has blocked further compassion for everyone and everything that I will reach and live fully embodied in when I get more healthy! God Bless your Family and all who have been helped, and may help reach everyone who is still waiting 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
I visit patients in care homes and I will tell you that they are, (with some exceptions) some of the most miserable places you can be. The nurses in care facilities are terribly exploited and forced to work in appalling conditions and they are paid poverty wages. Many of the patients are mean and violent and racist and nurses are expected to tolerate their abuse. The work is backbreaking. They're forced to work extra shifts and overtime because it's often so short staffed that if the nurse leaves they will be held criminally liable for abandoning the patients. I have seen nurses lash out at patients or handle them roughly- it's no wonder they do.
My mom (who is also a boomer) was s an ambulant nurse until like 4 years ago and like she loves the job but like she came home bruised a few times. Like either because people with dementia got scared and started flailing or some were just really bitter. Its a hard job that's tremendously underappreciated both in payment and social connotation. Her job didn't have to be this hard. Like if elderly people who have limited mobility with decades of life ahead of them who are distanced from their family for whatever reason still had options to do anything except sit at home and watch TV, especially also hang out with people they actually like, they wouldn't feel abandoned. Also like washing a person who cant move autonomously as a singular person in your fifties... that shouldnt be a job, you need help for that.
@@simsamtimtam It really doesn't have to be that hard. Sometimes if a person is violent, you need several people to to assist or often there's that one person who works well with them. But- and idk of you're in the US- but a lot of these places here are owned by corporations that manage a hundred facilities and whose goal is to have the fewest staff possible and pay them as little as possible
I have several scars from the nursing home patients I had, many have serious psych problems and are very violent; you think meemaw isn't a threat til she's got her claws out and is covered in shit and you have to magically clean her up with no restraints. I've had shit, piss, and blood in my eyes from working in long term care; long term care is a dumping ground for patients with the most needs who get the lowest care due to staffing and for profit nursing home budgets, it's a fate worse than death.
My mom had to fight off a few people in her career because they were afraid of black people touching them. "Don't touch me you old ape." Heard that a lot from her growing up
I, and a lot of young leftists, really needed this callout. Thanks for being as intelligent and honest as you always are, and I am forever grateful for the work you do.
This is all fine and dandy until you realize that class boundaries neatly follow generational lines. Of you want to source unearned wealth, the majority is going to come from white boomers
I was born in 1995. I'm an engineer working in a manufacturing plant, where the majority of hourly laborers are much older than me. Not all of them are leftist, but all of them are struggling. Many of them commute two hours both ways. The idea that I have more in common with the mid-twenties child of a billionaire than with my coworkers is laughable.
Last time I was out grocery shopping, I was behind an older adult in line and the register and bagger were both older as well. They were all talking about how hard it was to find work and that they expected to retire "when they were six feet under" and it was some of the most depressing shit I've ever heard.
My mom made me aware of jobs stating physical abilities such as being able to lift a certain amount or stand for periods of time etc as a way to ward off older people. I always thought it was about disabled people. It never occurred to me that it excluded people going through the natural part of aging. I feel comfortable saying I'm a leftist but I also admit to falling for the hype. It absolutely should be "okay capitalist" and not "okay boomer." We leftists need criticism as well and to hold ourselves accountable.
I'm 53 and increasingly concerned with whom I'll age alongside and in proximity of. At least a couple of older friends have re-closeted themselves, so that they can live a bit safer. A couple of others have looked at their circumstances, figured they have a very small amount of time left, and have burst from various lifelong closets in glorious FUCK THIS SHIT fashion. We're trying to have each other's backs as best we can. It's rough. I don't think I've ever felt as punk as I do now. Lots of fighting to do, in the cool and difficult way. Thanks for talking about this smokescreen. It's important.
That's all so so fascinating. I think the whole world of older queer life is just underrepresented in our discourse. And that doesn't help anyone. Thank you for commenting
I'm 54 and as an lgbtq+ person it's disheartening that I will never escape people hating me for who I am. I'll keep being me, but 54 isn't that old of an age either way imo. Keep thinking I'm weak world. Still here, still queer.
"I feel guilty about 'why didn't we figure it out earlier'" Don't feel bad, Sarah's dad. Oil companies had it figured out in the 70s but they suppressed the information.
The ideological conflicts that arise when taking care of the elderly sometimes make this extremely difficult. I remember a pretty formative experience when I was 14, I decided to do groceries for the 84 year old lady who was living alone in the apartment below us. She invited me for tea, thanked me and said: you have some beautiful eyes, they are mirrors of the soul you know?" Then proceeded: "I do hope you don't have any jewish friends because they'd ruin you" As I was aware this elderly nazi had 0 power and was living in almost complete isolation, needed care and yet, I felt I was betraying my beliefs and friends by helping her.. It wasn't something my 14 year old brain could cope with... and ehm.. I'm still not sure how that situation could have best been resolved within the community.
This is an issue that I'm grappling with as well. A year or so ago I heard the only grandpa figure in my life say that all queer people should be kil**d (for context, I'm a bisexual and (largely closeted) non binary person living in a country where most people are not even bothered by statements like this). A few months later I found out he had stage 4 cancer and might die anytime so in a way by hardly ever visiting my grandparents I risk having a person who loves me to his core die without seeing me one last time but visiting my grandparents causes me intense discomfort due to how homophobic he (and the rest of my family tbh, although they're not as violent) is as I know he wouldn't love me if he actually knew who I am. Older people who are as wholesome as those in the video are extremely rare and although I do believe people don't deserve to die lonely and neglected it's also incredibly naive to think that talking to them is likely to be a largely positive experience without doing everything in one's power to avoid any and all political topics. Even if one can learn a lot from them, oftentimes it's more of a dreaded responsibility rather than something one can enjoy unless they fit the communal standart of what is acceptable perfectly
@@miglek9613 I'm sorry you're in such a painful predicament. I think it's best to do what makes you feel the most loved and cared for. It doesn't sound like your family provides safe space for you, and it's okay to grieve or feel hurt even if/when you take steps to remain distant (or not let conversations go Too Deep). I hope you have other people in your life to help.
That hits close to home. :/ After years of estrangement, I discovered my elderly father had at some point fallen head first into the hole of conspiracy theories, antisemitism etc. I now live with a person who's literally shaking at the thought of finding someone to talk to, and what they most want to talk about is the jewish conspiracy to reduce white population of europe, break up traditional families by pushing diversity and LGBT "propaganda" and so on and so forth. (which is "great" for me, personally) No, he's not a right wing Christian, btw, he's extremely anti-religious and seems to mostly support pro-Russian slavic nationalism. He thinks he's anti-capitalist, but like...functionally his opinions fall under some flavour of fascism and fervent anti-americanism. And there's some cognitive decline already, substance abuse...Shit's hard sometimes.
I would show up with a support friend, come out in the most flamboyant way possible, and just drop that in their lap. If they only “love” you if you’re straight, they already have the wrong mindset and simply getting them to act on it won’t change anything.
"Hey, it's [seniors care facility]. We found your mom unconscious and non-responsive again and called an ambulance. Also we're evicting her because this keeps happening and we don't want to deal with it anymore. She lives at the hospital now." "Hey, it's [hospital]. Just to let you know we discharged your mom, who doesn't know where she is and doesn't know she doesn't have a home, a few hours ago and she's still in front of the hospital. Can you do something about this?" ... it's 10am and I need a beer.
Hearing someone of that age say "if you're a decent person, of course you're a socialist" makes me want to cry. I think my life would be a lot richer and less isolated if I had older leftists like this to talk to, but I just don't.
This feels like a terrible take. there's barely 100,000 reds in the country. If the number of people that are decent are so low, why stress ourselves to help these ghouls?
@@ericmcintosh6167 because helping people is a good thing? Because when people feel better and have better lives its easier for them to think about others and not be so bound up in their own torture.
@@ericmcintosh6167yeah, I’ve noticed that even w my abusive centre-right step dad, the best approach for both of us, is for me to tell the truth and leave when I can’t take any more. He probably doesn’t even deserve my time, but insulting him only makes things worst. Although, talking to him, usually doesn’t reveal very much. Capitalists are frustratingly predictable and uncreative.
There’s more of us than you think! I’m in my sixties, but please don’t confuse me with Fox News viewers just because I happen to be straight, cis and white! Unfortunately, the right has a very loud voice in the media. I’m hoping to see a move toward more compassion-socialism-as younger generations take over. I’m tired of rich old men making policy that doesn’t even affect them.
I’m ex NHS - I was a true believer. I’ve done loads of voluntary work, mostly around the elderly, but they just shut it all down here. I go to church, I cry when puppies get rescued, haven’t eaten meat since the 80’s…. Am I nice? Tbh I’m enjoying this channel despite the fact I’m now very much on the right and have been for decades. I look back with embarrassment on my hippiness. How deluded I was. I should have watched that Russian fellah that explains leftism is communism, and I should have read the Gulag Archipelago when it came out.
“The older I get, the lonelier I become.” Tell me about it, I’m about to be 31 and while I’m married I don’t have kids but even so between working, errands, household chores, hobbies, and being tired _all the time_ maintaining a social life has become basically impossible.
Other thing I want to bring up here, I worked for unemployment through the pandemic last year and the discussion about job security is really true. I cannot tell you the number of older adults I had to try and help who were let go first because they had been with a company for decades but all their management saw was their hourly & insurance cost, and were now stuck because they couldn't find work because of their age. No one wanted to meet their old wage, no one wanted to handle their insurance, no one wanted to take on the "risk" of older workers who could get sick or have an accident or was "only going to be working a few more years" and you could here it in all of them being like, "So what, am I supposed to just die then?", because it was that, or work as a Walmart greeter at like a tenth their old wages, lose their homes & all the equity the built up in them, get bled out, and THEN just die. Aging right now under capitalism is brutal for everyone and age has its own unique horrors that we will not see till then, and we need to listen and take them in, cause they want out of this bullshit as much as we do, and if we can't help them what the fuck is going to happen when we hit that point? Cause, I don't know about everyone else, but the old folks homes sound like a nightmare I'd look to avoid, and that's before we talk about how they bleed away all your assets just to keep you there, leaving you in a situation where the longer you live the less you can leave to your family, so that it's preferable to die quick so that your children & grandchildren might have a house to live over having nothing & having to figure out how to pay for your funeral.
@@TheLeftistCooks np. The first time I ever broke down at unemployment was on one of those calls when I realized this old woman might die in her house and the last person she would talk to is me. And it was all because a boss saw her paycheck, and her insurance costs and was like, she's who's expendable. And I think about how my grandma was in a home and the thing ate her house to pay for it. At the time of her passing my brother had his first kid and a second on the way and was still renting. I remember him talking about wishing he could buy it, and how off it was that we couldn't move into this place we used to spend every other weekend at because our grandma had the gaul to want to stick around and meet her grandkids at 92 rather than pass away before they ever got here. I've had to talk with my own Mom about that a lot since then, and ALL OF IT feels like something we all shouldn't be having to do. Why does a system that forces us to choose between poverty and starvation or sending your elders out into the woods to die need to continue to exist?
I have to share a short personal story; TLDR- I witnessed and participated in elder abuse at a former job. I was born in 1995. I am a nurse now. This takes place in a rural/suburban town in Iowa. One of the jobs that I worked at during my few years in nursing school was the largest local nursing home in my area. I went into this job as a young(er), starry-eyed, bleeding heart nurse’s aide. My very first day on the job was surreal: the local news on the TV was discussing the approaching dissolution of Iowa’s state ombudsman department. “The Ombudsman Department” in Iowa was specifically tasked with advocating for the disempowered population of nursing home residents; every nursing home resident is disempowered by the way. One of the first tasks delegated to me by my RN(nurse) was to keep a resident’s cigarette in my pocket. The RN called me to the desk, physically inserted the cigarette into my scrub top pocket, and told me: “this is ‘Ks’(a resident) cigarette. She asks for too many a day. The doctor’s order says she can have 1 cigarette every hour during the day. Keep it in your pocket for the next 15 minutes, then it will be okay to give it to K.” This task felt like some sort of hazing ritual. Very strangely to me, K was standing near us, watching and listening as the RN put her cigarette in my pocket and ordered me to withhold it from her for the next 15 minutes. I was dumbfounded. I had no idea what to do- it was my very first day as a real caregiver. I decided to walk down the hallway away from the desk and K. K followed me and started to literally cry as her old body tried to keep up with my young body. I felt very uneasy. I didn’t want to disobey orders or get in trouble. Neither did I want to torture a woman whom I’m ultimately tasked to caring for. This was my first day. “Surely not every day is like this?” I thought. As I’m walking down the hall, trying to escape K’s anguish, an ombudsman turned the corner and stopped me. She asked what was going on. I explained. She then looked me in the eye and asked me: “Do you think that this is the right thing to do?” I replied: “This is my first day. I’m following the orders that were given to me.” In response the ombudsman said: “I think you should just give K the cigarette.” I did give K the cigarette. She stopped crying, and started heading to the nurse’s desk to retrieve a lighter from the RN. I went further across the hall to help someone else, and also to get away from that situation. A few days later, at the end of the week, there were no more ombudsman in the halls or in the building at all. There were no more ombudsman in the state. During my year at this job I witnessed and learned many things about empathy. I have dozens of similar stories that I could recount. I moved up to the Alzheimer’s unit after a few months. Like I said, I have dozens of terrifying, humbling, enraging, and hopeless stories that I could tell. I felt that most of my coworkers simply ignored the humanity of the job in order to cope with the intensity of it. I ended up quitting after witnessing much neglect, trying to speak out, and barking up the entire chain of command, to no avail. This was the culture that had been cultivated here. I was powerless to change it, though I tried. I’m a registered nurse now myself. Things aren’t much better in hospitals. Things are certainly different, but much of the culture is like that of the facility I came from: especially regarding the elderly. I really do understand the desire to separate from the humanity, from the empathy, of working in our modern healthcare system. It’s almost necessary just to stay sane. Maybe I’m too much of a bleeding heart or too sensitive or too optimistic, but it really hurts to see how this system treats people. It’s infuriating to realize that there are those ‘at the top’ of this system who profit immensely from it. I’ve been forced to withhold care because of insurance technicalities. Both the patients and the caregivers experience their own forms of disempowerment- and it hurts us all, deeply. Today I practice to be the best caregiver that I can possibly be with humaneness as my core principle. I’m not perfect, but I try. I hope that in some way I can help this system change into one that is focused on the people as human beings, instead of as products and statistics. I hope that others will too.
I too was born in 1995. One year in school, I applied for the available summer jobs, and one of them got back to me. An old people's home. I learnt one thing from that place, and it is that I would rather die younger. The people staying there had nothing to do. Once a week someone read to them from some book. It was supposed to be for half an hour, I think, but usually ended up only 15 minutes. The food was bland and mass produced, and as an aspie most of it was far from appetizing. At least one person staying there was spending a lot of time in the bed, and the workers didn't change their diaper until a certain amount of time before relatives would visit. They claimed the reason to be "they would just soil themselves again". Even if I was a kid, I feel bad for not helping them. I merely came and went, no whistleblowing or anything. I did have plans to "step up my game" and read to them or something, but before I had the free time to do that one of the residents said something about my body that made me pretty much hide away for the other half of the summer job instead. I'm not a caretaking person, even if I'm an advocate for caring. These places need to be so much more than they are. There are so extremely many social issues and even if I devoted the rest of me to one of them, it would be like a mosquito trying to change the course of a spaceship by crashing into it.
Being a CNA in a nursing home working an average of 70 hours a week and doing administrative jobs on off hours to try and make things better for several years showed me that it's impossible to fix the American Healthcare system, it's a meatgrinder. As a RN now in critical care, it's also a dumpster fire. It's hard to reconcile what you want to do and what is possible with purposefully limited time and resources to increase profit for administration and shareholders. I love nursing, I hate "Healthcare".
The cigarette story is a clear example on how we remove autonomy from institutionalized people. Normally it would be up to the patient to decide if they wanna reduce cigarette intake. This decision was clearly imposed with complete disregard as to whether patient felt it was worth it or not. It's the end of their lives dammit let them live how they want...
I paused halfway through this video to give my grandpa a phone call. My grandmother died about half a year before covid and he's had to deal with that isolation on top of isolation caused by covid, so that's not easy for him. I do call him sometimes, but not enough, really. It might not have been your intention, but thank you for pushing me to give him a call again.
One of the things that makes it hard for me to approach this topic with an open mind is that my grandmother was a consistent source of emotional and religious abuse towards me and my family for my entire life, up until the point I cut her out of it. It is hard for me to listen to people talking about how we need to do more for these groups without thinking back to that situation where the respect and social power of an individual ruined a good chunk of my life simply because she had really shitty ideas that included everyone around her being her servants and agreeing with every belief she had. It keeps me wanting to conclude that a lot of the harm that befalls older adults is because of how they behave. But I also know that's not the full story, even if it is definitely part of it, and that it is important to stay lucid as a victim of abuse so I don't begin to blame everyone who even looks to be in a slightly similar situation to my grandmother. I also worked at an elderly home. I'm gonna go full name drop because the place still exists and it was almost every nightmare you hear about. DePaul was the parent company, Woodcrest Commons was the actual facility. Unsanitary kitchen conditions (where I worked cleaning dishes and would regularly be chastised for taking too much time despite the fact that when anyone else cleaned them they would have ) , aides that didn't help the residents do things like move back to their rooms when they need assistance to move at all, aides that swore at the residents, people not getting their meds on time, sundowning patients being left to their own devices when just a little bit of kindness was enough to calm them down (personal experience speaking, I know that's not the case with every incident of sundowning)... The list could probably go on if I decided to sit here and hour and scour my memories, but I think everyone gets the point. The only comfort I have about that place is that I got out before I found myself mirroring the behaviors of my coworkers. It may be true that few people are truly innocent of abuse. But that doesn't mean those people deserve to be abused. This is a cycle that we must break if we want to not continue it in our own actions and the actions of others. I hope anyone who has experiences that mirror the first paragraph reads to this point and understands what I'm trying to say. No matter what problems you might have with those elderly adults in or around your life they do not deserve abuse, and if they propagate abuse it is likely that they themselves received similar to the abuse they propagate, and the perceptive biases baked into humanity make this very easy to forget.
I've always found it interesting that people think gen Z is progressive and informed if only because where I grew up the majority of people I knew were far right - like extremely so
It's so true. These movements have existed for generations. Someone had to be part of them. When we act like we're the most informed and moral, not only is it arrogant and all kinds of rude, but we spit on the people who have worked to make this world better for decades upon decades (even though there are always valid and important critiques). We all make our choices, and we make them every day. To deprive anyone of this truth and reduce them to a monolith is dehumanizing and actively works against liberation. We all deserve a chance to act in service of a better world. This isn't aimed at you, for the record. I'm just writing out some thoughts.
Brilliant. Thoughtful. And filled with hard truths. How we treat the older people in our community is a good barometer of how we treat the rest of our community. Thank you Sarah and Neil for starting this discussion.
What a lovely video. My grandfather developed alzheimers and it was really frustrating to see him go from an adult to someone people essentially treated like a large toddler. I remember trying to have a conversation with him and people would tell me that I needed to talk simpler or he wouldn't understand me. It always felt wrong that he had to go out that way. I wonder if a lot of the distancing from older people is partially guilt. That we know we're mistreating older people and rather than facing that we'd rather just not think about it.
Hi Sam. That's such a good example you give. It's sad and I can imagine it must have been very hard. I think you're right in terms of guilt. The data we found pointed to people's anxiety around their own ageing being a pretty cut and dry factor in whether or not they'd hold ageist beliefs. "Fear of death makes people assholes." - I dunno, some German existentialist probably
(an unnecessary, bleak addendum past that tiny bit of parasocial euphoria: My job requires me to talk with mostly older, female adults with low proficiency in English. Also, my job requires me to talk to a bunch of health professionals. Professional protocol offers the smallest of windows to offer kindness to people who are literally letting you know that their mental problems outweigh their physical health one. You can find kinder inflections, warmer choices of words, better ways to ask, small chances to let them talk... Immigrant older women, often without any scholarity, often illiterate, dragged by bonds of marriage to a hostile, unintelligible land, left alone by the lives of their offsprings and the death of their loved ones. As far as I know, we didn't have boomers in Latin America. You will stumble upon older people washing windshields for coins here. Tell me what the fuck "okay boomer" means outside the Global North. ...sorry. Thank you for saying it, Neill. Gracias.)
I think for a lot of people their main interaction with older generations is their older family members who have been horrible to them, or who they couldn't have these conversations with. And it can be hard to separate bad personal experiences with members of certain groups from generalizations about the group as a whole but it is so important. I think this is where things like found family and community not bound by blood are so important. I can see that it is not my parents or grandparents' age that makes them so harmful for me to be around, but their beliefs. And these are beliefs they held when they were younger too, it's not related to their age. I just wish that there were more ways to connect with people across generations. Where I am the main community avenues for this are churches and most are not somewhere I am welcome. I actually know that there is a church here that lots of older queer folks go to, and I would love to get to know them, but I also have too much trauma around church in general. We need more community spaces
I find this relatable but also I never really blamed the older generation as a whole for when I experienced harm from my elders, even tho I felt the harm was unfair. While I remember 'youth v older people' when I was growing up, marketing category generations being opposed to eachother always struck me as weird - weird as in 'boomrrs v millens' is erasing of marginalised people. Agree, intergenerational interaction is so rare cause of the lack of spaces for it. Made harder now with pandemic.
I didn't understand how much people dehumanize the elderly/disabled until I saw how my family treated my grandmother, they would pretend like she didn't exist and wouldn't even reply to anything she said. Like she wasn't a person.
This is very well timed. I'm in between homes (not the bad kind) so i've moved back in with my parents recently. Even though we're all fairly well off, i'm glad my dad stopped watching fox news and basically became a communist over the last 10-15 years.
I don't think anyone really hates literal "boomers" we resent the old conservative judgy and rude people that voted for our current society. I'll hang out with 70 year old hippy any day its just the rest (in America at least) are difficult to tolerate.
Digging this so far, and I'm waiting for the point where Neil brings up the other practical reality of fighting ageism. That we will, all of us, get old, and that if we create a system that divests the old of their autonomy and offers them no safety net, we are dooming ourselves to that same trap and creating a critical point of failure in our own system that we saw coming, for no other reason than because we were at that time participating in the hostility actively or choosing to be blind. Neither answer is good, both of them are growing from the privilege our system places on us as younger, and all of it is again a false consciousness that is perpetuated by and at the benefit of the capitalist system we are seeking to escape. It is as if we have escaped the slaughter, but left the last slaughterhouse still operating, thinking we will not be going there, while we walk up the path right to its door. It is a foolish thing brought on by our youth, and a thing we must overcome.
@@TheLeftistCooks Lol right here. Been unemployed and looking for writing work XD. You ever need someone to talk about unemployment in the states, mechanics design, or do copy edit hit me.
This 100x. We're all future old people. It's mind boggling that people don't realize how absurd this all is. And it's a cycle that starts so small. Our parents said the cartoons and music we grew up with was bad, then we start doing that to younger people. Because, clearly, MY generation is the one generation that got it all right. Other generations are wrong. Now, here we are as millennials, blaming boomers for doing bad things economically. Well, guess what, the gig economy wasn't a boomer creation. Neither was crypto. Future generations will think we deserve the suffering we will live under as older people because of the bad stuff a minority of us did.
I trained to become a rest home caregiver because I really love caring for and supporting older adults, but I'm starting to seriously wonder whether I can do this professionally under the current system. People in my work placement kept telling me to "be more assertive" when an older adult doesn't want to do something. I understand that there's no easy answer when a person with dementia never wants to bathe or change their clothes, but can we not come up with a better option than either leaving them to suffer without personal hygiene or demanding they submit to our will? I want to be the good caregiver who really listens and makes people's lives a little better by showing them the respect they deserve, but maybe trying to help within the system will just make me part of the problem.
Thank you so much for this. I am a progressive church pastor and most of my church members are boomers and older. I absolutely love them. For the past two years I have been running a book study with them so they can learn about issues of racism, classism, and lgbtqia+ issues. Their comment over and over again is that they love the ideas and new information and they are happy that someone is finally teaching them the language being used to discuss these issues. I hear lots of people my age get made at older generations for making statements that were once progressive but are now regressive and I get it. But few people are willing to take the time to respectfully explain the ideas and concepts. Yes, the books are out there, but it can be daunting to wade through if you don't have a guide. So when one of the church teens came out as trans to the congregation, this group came to me asking for a book to help explain the diversity in gender expression. And they get it now! So thank you. Boomers can be pretty great.
babe come quick!! there's a new liberal cook video! amazing as always 💖 my mum and i were my grandad's carers until he passed (he had dementia for about 10 years). the hospital kept trying to get us to put him in a care home because it was easier on us. now idk about you, but removing a man with dementia from his home of 40+ years and sending him to a brand new environment he doesn't know or understand sounds like a surefire way to make him more confused and upset about everything. baffles me that they genuinely thought the "burden" his illness put on us was enough of a reason to put him in an environment that would have made him worse. they way ppl spoke about him while he was ill rly upset me. he was still a person, he still had thoughts and feelings even if they were sometimes obscured and confused by dementia. ffs my grandad was a teddy boy, he literally had the original Rebellious Teenager Phase. ppl know so little about their elders and make a lot of assumptions, but damn it my grandad was such a cool person. wish people bothered to know that about him.
Honestly made me cry and feel the need to rethink how I think about interacting with older adults to see that there area people of these generations who think like this. I mean, I always *knew* they were out there somewhere, but it's hard to internalize when pretty much the only older adults I've personally known have been in my family, and in my family they're all authoritarian conservatives. Hard to work up the courage to build relationships with older adults when this is the image of how I've learned them to be. So this video gives me some hope and I think is hopefully the first step in untangling these prejudices in me.
Helping my mom trying to take care of my grandma has made it abundantly clear how precarious most of our elders are. I do wish a lot of older adults would actually listen to their children and grandchildren a bit more though. We need to be able to communicate and it can often be really exhausting trying to get your parents/grandparents to listen to you. Of course we also have to step the fuck up and listen to them more too and take them more seriously
My grandfather is a republican white boomer but in his life capitalism took away his house, retirement, and the rifts with money broke up his family despite him working multible jobs. He is a good person at heart. But he's been so brainwashed by tv and his upbringing he has views that actively hurt him. I've had debates with him to try to get him to get this but he won't. He regrets having to work 3 jobs, but gets mad when I say he shouldn't of had to. He sees himself living in his sister's basement due to money a failure in himself when it really was a failure in society. He's lucky his sister has the money to employ him.
You mentioned briefly how car-centric communities increase isolation. My grandma passed quite a few years ago at 96, still an active member of her community living in the 1940s-built home my mum grew up in. I worry for my parents in their isolated suburb, as their few close friends and neighbors also age - will they have to move, will they be able to find new friends in a new community, will they be able to stay healthy as they age like my grandma... I'm able to live for now in an accessible area (of a different city to my parents), haven't owned a car in a few years, but my friends are spread throughout the city where they could find places affordable for them, and our ability to keep in touch is facilitated by our capacity to bike to meet each other. It seems so hard (partly as a neurodivergent person) to build a local community here, and it seems unlikely I'll be able to stay nearby when purchasing an apartment becomes practical.
Thank you so much for this video. It addressed a weird dissonance I've been feeling about leftist discourse around "boomers" and gerenational warfare and my actual experiences with older adults. Like you said, it's not older adults who are oppressing us, it's wealthy capitalists. Also, I know that a lot of younger people have had bad experiences with older adults who have bigoted beliefs, but I think we should really make an effort to talk to them and engage them in discourse. A lot of them want to learn. A lot of them want to talk to you. A lot of them don't want to feel left out or outdated.
Having worked in healthcare assistance with people with cognitive and physical disabilities of all ages; having seen the good, bad, and ugly of institutionalization by the state when your right to autonomy is a constant negotiation; having seen it as the most likely outcome for the vast majority of us as we age.............. I have always been very uncomfortable with ageist bigotry. Just because someone makes a dumb joke that you don't know how to use a rotary phone or is a brainwashed working class older person doesn't make them your oppressor, it makes them your fallen ally.
This was a really interesting video to watch right after a particular video by We're In Hell about Steven Pinker, and how happiness and wealth is measured. Neil's dad really hit the nail on the head. We have a lot more access to all of the trappings of wealth that are "supposed" to make us happy, but we've had all of the basic, structural necessities for us to be happy whittled away to damn near nothing. I'm very lucky in my line of work that I get to interact with people older than my parents on a regular basis (less regular now, though, due to .... waves hands about in a vague gesture at everything.) Most of them are right or centre-right in their political leanings, though there are a few lefties in the group, but all, and I mean ALL of them experience intense feelings of political disenfranchisement. They ALL hate what the politicians have done to our province and country (Canada) and they all want change. They just all tend to focus blame very differently, and I've found a huge amount of value in discussing that with them. It's helped me refine my own sociopolitical theories, and I like to think I've helped them see leftie subjects with a less threatening face. It's one thing to have ANTIFA and ANARCHISM prominently displayed to you as a masked, violent threat, and a totally different thing to have the local rural librarian you see on a weekly or biweekly basis say "Oh, yeah, antifascism is integral to my job, and I chose this job in part because it aligns with these specific anarchocommunist ideals." Anyway, that's a very long way to say I think this video is great, and it may be one of my favourites that you've done so far. Thank you for putting in the effort and time to make it!
I just want to share. We as Filipinos,as part of our eastern culture we pay high respect to our elders. Might it be a relative or not. We also take care of our elders and we as Filipinos are known for our extended family ties. Home for the aged centers are seldom and are less patronized here in our country. I think it's the same with other asian countries.
This entire video has a very western lens (mostly on purpose this time) in part because the problem of ageism is exacerbated by certain habits and ideologies of certain cultures within the incoherent thing we call the "west" Places like the Filipines or - off the top of my head - Japan, seem to do a far better job of looking after older adults in part, it seems, because respect for older adults is baked into the culture? (Maybe I'm making outsider oversimplifications there) But anyway yes you're right, many people from some Asian cultures don't need this lecture!
Thank you for this, it has given me a lot to think about. I will readily admit to carrying a lot of baggage with regards to Older Adults. I'm scared of aging and it is made worse by committing to not having children. Uncomfortable questions about what my life will be like, how will I meet my needs, ect. are so uncomfortable it is easier to hide them away than think about them. But, as you say, we are all going to grow old. It's always so hard to leave a comment on videos like this because there is no one one thing I write can encapsulate the magnitude of work and ideas contained within. All I can say is thanks. And give a story! We all love stories right?? Living in an economically downtrodden state in the US I was basically forced to work at Wal-Mart after college despite having a degree. I worked that job for 3 years and was sent across the different departments assisting the department managers. My favorite position was working for one of the few and good managers out there in Dep.2 which is body care, shampoo, ect. Well, we had a part-timer who only worked nights who was an Elderly Japanese immigrant woman, she must have been at least 70 by then. Everyone disliked her, said she was rude, slow, ect. Well, I have to say that lady and I got along pretty well because I had studied Japanese at High School and could speak with her, understood her culture. She wasn't mean, she was just not understood by her co-workers. No one was interested in her background, her experiences, and she was isolated as a result. I guess she was slow, but damn she was 70 and still going up and down ladders and carrying 20 lbs boxes of shampoo out to the floor. I can only look back now and say she was likely poor too, or else why was she working at such an age for such a poor wage? 😕 I got out of Wal-mart eventually but I doubt she ever did.
I'm a "geriatric" millennial. (Born 84.) My parents and in-laws were all born in the late 50s. My mom had a cancer scare earlier this year (benign, thankfully) and my FIL is in the hospital right now, having just had a heart attack today, and he's very sick, although he will almost certainly pull through. He's a very active and healthy guy and this is probably going to make it very difficult for him to maintain the level of activity he's used to. And this is the first time I have really sat with the feeling of these people I love being mortal, and the imminence of their passing (hopefully not too imminent, but today hits home). Thank you for this.
Wow. That is a LOT. I'm glad to hear it's various levels of recovery all round. Godspeed you all. I'm glad the video had an impact. My hope is to be something of a catalyst for at least a few lovely warm intergenerational chats.
The ageism I remember seeing growing up in a rural small town is anti-young ageism. The assumption that if you're a teenager or young adult, you don't know anything and can't make decisions for yourself. My whole life it's been "you're too young to know x" or "speak to your elders properly" not this ageism that's against the old. How do we deal with being belittled for being young without firing back in a way that's ageist against elders? How do we deal with very real hurt and anger they caused us, through their arrogance that age=wisdom and that means they were always FUCKING right about everything in every argument, how do we deal with those bitter feelings of resentment without ageism?
Dear lord this video is so important. The borderline eugenic sentiments among many young poeple, regardless of political alignment, is frightening. How does this not have more views???
This is SO fucking relevant. It’s hard to disentangle our culturally learned biases and stereotypes from our own thought-out opinions. We get carried away easily. We’re human. EVERYONE is human. Modern day older adults had it rough in their past lives, and it’s damn rough for a lot of them now. In ICUs, hospitals, nursing homes, community homes, etc. these people suffer greatly from ageism. It’s very normalized. All those crusty old grumps are human beings that deserve every single bit of humane respect and reverence as everyone else.
You make some very good points. Even some, where I could reflect on my own blind spots. But I think your definition of ageism doesn't include the fact that the older generation includes the group with the most political power. Both in voting power and in powerful positions. Therefore I tend to see movements on the basis of old age as benefitting the more priveledged part of the group. As opposed to improving the conditions of the struggling pensioner. However you still made me reflect on the less priveledged group of elderly who deserve to be treated better, and included in the community. Great video!
I see folks making subtle excuses for their ageism like "oh, but boomers are racist, boomers are bigoted, my boomer parents were abusive, etc, etc," and... I mean, have folks forgotten that literally every single person who exists ages, like, from the moment of conception? Linear time does not only apply to bigots and abusers and many, many of the older people who we disparage and neglect belong to the very same marginalized groups that the more insulated activists claim to care so much about, and this is regardless of the fact that we should ALL care about older people because older people are Human Beings. (Anyway, great video! I've been waiting for another leftist to finally take on this particular topic, and your work is always thorough and fun to watch, even when it's intense subject matter lmao)
If someone else wants to care for my racist, homophobic, ageist, abusive parents, then by all means they’re welcome to it, but it’s not in any way my responsibility to destroy myself further by continuing to be in the same room as them as they (still) hurtle abuse at me for being a queer vegan polyamorous millennial with a poc significant other. They can’t physically abuse me anymore, but I’m also not obligated to subject myself to their presence. I’m not going to actively prevent their happiness or whatever, but I’m also not gonna voluntarily be a part of their lives.
@@CraftyVegan Yes, and that's fine, I wasn't saying "you should put up with abuse from boomers," I was saying "you shouldn't excuse ageism toward older ppl based on the actions of the abusive ones" EDIT: And this shouldn't be necessary, but I know it will make a difference in terms of how ppl view my comments (and this isn't directed at you or anyone else specifically) but I'm a younger millennial (in my late 20s) and I have been ageist against older adults in the past, and honestly still to this day sometimes. It's something I'm working on, because it's the right thing to do. We shouldn't reduce the members of marginalized groups to the actions of random, awful individuals who happen to be part of the same group. That's what I was ultimately getting at. For example, I'm also a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and if I had a straight friend who'd been abused by some random LGBTQ+ person, I would not want that friend to automatically associate that abuse with LGBTQ+ people as a whole just because their abuser happened to be a member of that group. I would not want them to judge the entire group I belong to as being inherently evil based on the actions of a particular individual. I just think we should all keep this sort of thing in mind.
My old friend that I used to work for just passed away last week. He was a really great and interesting man. An original old hippie. He was part of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 60's. He spent the last twenty years inventing and building his own instrument. It was three massive pieces that he called the tones and described as part glockenspiel and part windchime. I worked with him for about eight years and learned so much. I probably wouldn't be where I am today if it hadn't been for Coburn. While I cannot stand people who are still reading from the Book of Reagan, Boomers are not a monolith. I've known some great ones.
Thank you so much for this video! I’d been baffled for a long time how casually we dismiss older people’s concerns and experiences and normalise their suffering but in my head this category had still been entirely separate from Boomers. The power of labels. I’m really glad you address this narrative of generational warfare that has ‘the young’ pitted against ‘the old’, for instance ‘competing’ for the same houses and apartments according to semi-recent news headlines. I also found it incredibly valuable to see and listen to actual older adults - which sounds strange, but those not in any position of authority are so rarely given a voice in online spaces. (And you do have cool dads. :)) I’m also realising that I haven’t been around many older people during my 20s, reminding me again how the organisation and design of our public spaces, living spaces, social and family structures (e.g. monogamy + individualism rather than extended families), and careers deliberately separates the generations, pushing those who aren’t ‘productive’ to the margins so they don't 'burden' the nation's workforce. Out of sight, out of mind. And even if you want to care for elderly family at home, few can afford that. And you’re right, capitalism has an easy job of secluding older people because most folks are uncomfortable being confronted with the idea of ageing and of death, which is only reinforced by the invisibility of older people. Lamenting your own age and ageing and in the process disparaging anyone who is older or looks older is such a normalised practice, even in the presence of people older than you. I never really identified with being a young person but it still took chronic illness to make me stop equating age with deteriorating health. I think if we were better at grieving the loss of our own abilities and well-being we could also show empathy and hold space for those whom we habitually view as being defined by nothing but deteriorating mental and physical capacities. Instead we take our fears of our own unimaginable end, confine them within a group of people stripped of any other characteristics, dehumanised, and exorcise them from our midst in what Kristeva calls abjection.
I'm a gen X trans dude, and was 13 when the aids came about... I remember that all the talk about it frightened us kids before we even thought of having actual sex, and continued to freak us out throughout the 90's. Maybe that's the root of all the retrograde currents we saw after that, and the renewed backwards conservative ideas floating around 🤔. It is born out of fear of sex. I've been blessed with a slower aging process than my peers, and basically have much younger friends because I don't understand that mindset. But yeah, some boomers are really cool, my best friend is 74 and is basically an old hippie 😝. I think that by the time we will be old, retirement homes will maybe be more diverse, full of hard rockers, punks, rappers, all those that where already weird and stayed themselves.
Almost everyone I've seen called a boomer is actually gen-X, which made me very quickly disinterested in the term. Also ya gotta put your index finger along the top of the knife, that way it's easier to guide so you can chop faster, safer 💖
Something that I find odd but in a good way is how easily I've been able to talk and get along with older people (at work (in a pub that has been there for centuries so the regulars are multi-generational), with family (tagging along to the clubs, fairs and voluntary activities my grandparents do), and when volunteering in a hospital briefly before Covid hit). It might be that my manner of speaking is rather formal and I am out of touch with a lot of slang and cultural references, due to having lived away from my home country for a decent chunk of my childhood and a hyper fixation on only what interests me and not seeing the importance of keeping up with whatever Timmy thinks is cool to say this week (I'm autistic). All of that, and my difficulty discerning when someone is being sincere/literal or not means that I am able to just sit and listen where others would either ignore them or think their mind is acting up. It disturbed me how inattentive and uncaring the nurses at the hospital were. They were likely tired and desensitized to physical and emotional distress experienced by patients, but it felt cruel the degree to which they neglected their patients. Volunteers like me and my peers helped a little (providing company mostly), but we were only permitted to be there for two hours. I get really frustrated with the amount of my peers who disregard the humanity of any old person they aren't closely related to.
I'm disabled & I still struggle with ableism. Internalized, mostly, but I'm also re-examining my assumptions + beliefs about others now too. It's so baked into the culture in N America & a lot of English idioms. So it's a "well...let's keep trying & learning to do + be better as a person" situation for many of us, including myself. I expect it's a lifelong commitment.
My mother (born in the 40s) fell foul to the echo chamber or generational warfare and posted something on FB that offended my niece. I’m in the generation trying and failing to explain both sides 🤔😉. One of my takeaways after watching that conversation with Sarah’s dad was thatI should take friends around to see my mum so they can remind me of the things about her that are actually very cool. This is such great work - as proven by the spark of discussion happening already. Congrats 🎉!
I truly enjoy the company of elderly people. They have so much knowledge and wisdom despite being wrong about things. They have decades of experience more than me, dozens more friends, and countless decisions that they made in their life. They shouldn't be forgotten or ignored because of their age. No one should.
Came back here to say that this video was probably the biggest inspiration for me to reach out to the older adults in my life. Just recently started a conversation with my grandparents, who have very different beliefs and values than me, and started talking about who I really am and what I believe with them. It was a pretty rough start, and there's still a lot we need to talk about, but I at least feel like there's a decent chance of us having a meaningful relationship for the first time in my life. Thanks for the vid.
Thank you so much for coming back to say that. The work and the leap of faith is all yours to take the credit for. But we're honoured to have been any part of such a noble endeavour.
This is definitely a really important conversation to have. I think I've been blind to ageism in the past because I have mostly had poor experiences with the older adults around me. From my parents to elected officials to bosses, it's sucked a lot! But it is important to talk about how older adults are horrifically mistreated on a societal level.
I remember in high school one of our teachers made us write an essay about the care of elders in elderly homes and most students rolled their eyes and said "who cares about that?" I found it appalling
This morning, people were talking about death on the radio as part of a campaign to be able to talk about it more. Of course, the people who were interviewed about dealing with death and grief, were pretty ok with it and had found positive ways to cope. I think that's great, but it also perpetuates the idea that death is something we have to solve, we have to be able to cope and get over it. The problem is that most people find it looming over their lives like a darkness they can't escape. When I volunteer in a local elderly home, I notice the people working there like to combat the stuffiness by making jokes. Sort of poking the other person is seen as a sign of friendship in my culture, but the slight insults aren't always kind and sometimes unintentionally hurtful, and so it's just not my style of treating people. The toxic positivity acts as a veil for the looming death present in the home. Are we supposed to be content with dying? That mindset is what makes people push it away. We can talk about loneliness, we can talk about leaving existence, to other people, and cry. It's ok to not be ok about it. Maybe closeness to death makes it less daunting, I wouldn't know. But it is clear that aging takes it's toll and society just isn't willing to acknowledge how hard it actually hits.
Love that you're covering this topic! I'm a disabled person and and activist- but I'm also poor AF so for a while I worked in a nursing home. First off, we had segregated wings for the wealthy versus the not wealthy patients. There was a different smell when you crossed into the Nice Part™. I saw a lot of ableism, neglect, unsafe practices, and even verbal abuse. It was bad. I was eventually fired for my conflicts with the manager (I work in the food service side) over health code violations. I was told "just use water, it's the same" when I ran out of sanitizer 😖 Peak COVID times too, and we had an ongoing outbreak in the facility which took many lives. I still got calls about the COVID situation up until recently. It got worse after I left 😅
I was born in the same year as your father, and yea, a lot has happened since then. Discrimination against the elderly is kind of stupid, because that is a group that you will become part of. Young people will, mostly, never change into a different race, ethnicity, etc. But they definitely will turn into a different age. Yet, somehow, it never feels like that is the case when you are younger, and we keep making the same mistakes. Being told "OK, Boomer" is really pretty mild compared to what the boomers themselves used to say about those older than themselves. In the first wave of the baby boomers, they used to say "Never trust anybody over 30," and even "killer your parents." And then the tail end boomers (like me). Used to say "kill hippies," and refer to "tired old hippies," and referred to a gay bar that had broken with tradition by having big windows as "the crystal coffin," We referred to marijuana as a "Tired old hippy drug"" (but still smoked it sometimes.). We called older gay men "tired old queens." And on and on. There was even a gay bar back in the 1979s with a sign on the door saying "No fatties, no femmes, no uglys, and of course, nobody over 40." Therefore, I have trouble mustering up too much anger against the "OK boomer" meme. But of course, you are right. Most of us did not ruin the planet, except passively, by participating in the system as it is, when we had very little choice, the same as everybody of all ages does now. Evan the ones who tried to get off the industrial wheel by moving out of cities, taking up farming, and so forth found out that being outside of cities meant that you had to drive even more .Some of us were activists and environmentalists long ago and have been ever since. The people who really created the f---ed up conditions that the world is in now were a small minority of the rich and powerful. And yes, every generation produced a new crop of activists, a new crop of apathetics, and a new crop of ruthless members of the Uber wealthy and powerful ruling class. And yes, young adults do have it worse than we did when young in many ways. But anyway, I try to not be one of those old guys who complains about"young people today." Not even when I am almost run over by a teenage skateboarder who is riding down the sidewalk while looking at his phone. Manufactured intergenerational conflict is, as you point out, just another way to keep us from focusing on our common enemies.
I've actually pretty recently started working at a cafe with a lot of elderly regular customers. I have a lot of trouble chatting to people I don't really know since I have social anxiety and I hardly ever chat with older people bc I always think that we wouldn't have enough common ground. this has been helpful in showing me that there really isn't so much of a cultural separation between older and younger people, which is something I think I subconsciously knew to an extent but this is making me really face it. I hope this helps me out with chatting to our older customers bc most of them really do seem lovely and I'd be great if I can help them feel less lonely. the way older people are systematically oppressed isn't really something I'd put much thought into as well and so I'm glad I came across this video bc it's opened my mind up more to being mindful of how older people are treated by the systems in place. so yeah, thank you for this! it's given me a lot to reflect on
Every time I watch one of your videos I learn something new. Stuff that I knew existed on some vague level, but never bothered to think about before. Thanks for all of the thoughtful research you put into these videos!
@@TheLeftistCooks hahaha. no, then it's a neoliberal free for all. the commodity of being "first" no longer becomes yours to exchange on the market due to your being late, but rather becomes a resource to be mined by technocrats, those monitoring many popular channels with bots, scripts, and so on, competing with one another, evading RUclips's automated and human controls - just to get their stinky cryptoscam (& etc) replies all over your fresh beautiful content. i know from personal experience anarcho-capitalism is nonsense and never truly exists; whenever we think it does we aren't seeing it but rather fascism or neolieralism.
The beginning of Part 3 hits too hard. I'm 39 & I definitely feel the pangs of not being young. I'm a solitary individual by design (as a formerly picked-on kid who became insufferably cool in my teens/20s) but watching my friends get into bad marriages or jobs, move away just to be equally sad in Utah or just straight-up fucking *die* is rough. My mom is 64 & we're incredibly close but I'm definitely guilty of thinking and speaking in a way that you've made me see is *bigoted* & hurtful. It's so easy to remember how much material success my parents have had that it sometimes slips my mind how much they've lost. My dad committed suicide when I was 16 because he lost his house. My dad, the self-imposed King of Overtime. All that to say, excellent video. Please please please continue making these insightful (and funny) little pockets of sanity disguised as RUclips videos.
This is interesting, but I haven't really seen it discussed about how most of us have been hurt by all (or most) old adults in our lives? Both of my grandmothers and grandfathers have been using their relative power over me to be sexist and encourage my ed. But whose aren't? Grandparents that aren't homophobic and racist are a dime in a dozen. It's hard to connect to older people when every older person we've connected to attempted to manipulate or abuse you
This is a very sweet sentiment, but many of us have boomer parents who are Reagan Republicans. I know I do. Talking to them about politics is like talking to a brick wall. They admit that I'm smarter than they are, that I'm more thoughtful and educated, and then anytime I say anything they don't agree with, they accuse me of being indoctrinated by the schools. I've tried for decades to reach them and the best I can reach is an uneasy truce. For some of us, this class solidarity with the older generations is too much to hope for.
I suppose I would advocate that we think of it like any other internalised bias. We shouldn't assume someone is not on our side based on their being an older adult. More potential allies and human connections, and less ageism with its hugely damaging various social impact.
@@TheLeftistCooks I guess I had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to this video: "Sure, it's easy to get along with boomers when they didn't loudly and proudly spend literal decades endorsing proto-fascists." There's a huge population among them, especially in America, who are Reagan republicans and are proud of the fact that he laughed at gay people dying during the AIDS epidemic. You're right that we should look for allies where we can and we should work to improve the lives of everyone and protect the elderly, EVEN when they're awful because it's the right thing to do. But I don't think it's wrong to call out a generation that spent so many years being publicly racist, homophobic, and hating the poor for continuing to be racist, homophobic, and hating the poor.
@@JulietTango exactly, I feel like this is very overlooked in the video. The majority of my patients are Boomers, and my god, racism and homophobia is the standard for them, and I live in a very diverse area. When you talk to thousands of Boomers, the bigoted patterns are definitely there.
@@JulietTango but the generation you're talking about also includes the people they were, as you put it, laughing at. And even more people that stayed away from public politics altogether. And quite a lot of them are still here.
Was that your sister joining in on the credits music? That was a really nice ending to a fantastic video. Great essay as always. It's important to remember that while most rich consevatives are old (because wealth and influence accumulate), most old people aren't rich conservatives and we reject cross-generational solidarity at our peril. I'm a member of the socialist party of my country and most of the finest and most involved members of my local chapter are 60+ and can share stories of organizing with leftists for several decades.
I'm gonna be 40 this year. I'm a single mom and raising a son with a disability. I've come to realize that not only am I 100% unhireable for any job. I am also completly socialy shunned. I havent been face to face with another human in a friend like way in NINE years. (Living in Utah but not going to church might be a factor). I'm just numb to it now. I socialize online when the world starts to feel unreal.
new viewer here! this video was so so well made and i am definitely subscribing. there’s just something about this video that gives me a great feeling about your channel! i am a zoomer, born in 2001. my parents were born in the early ‘70s. both came from working class backgrounds but neither having participated in politics or activism. yet nowadays my dad is under the influence of the conspiracy theorist ideology. hearing his views makes me hopeless and sad and scared. so, it was incredibly refreshing to hear your dad and sarah’s dad talk sense!! facts and logic!! it was also a little bit upsetting for me - why can’t i have a cool socialist dad? but anyway, back to the topic at hand. i’ll admit i know very little about cases of elder abuse other than that of stan lee. either i’m not being shown stories about it or people just aren’t talking about it. so thank you for bringing attention to it, those videos of elder abuse are awful and i hope those people who were abused are in a safer place now.
I keep coming back to this video. I was lucky enough as a kid to know some of my great-grandparents - I can't really sum it up better than to say, my great-grandmother listened to Rush Limbaugh on the radio, so my great-grandfather would take his hearing aids out and just lip-read what anyone was saying. My great-grandmother was a complicated figure for everyone in the previous generations - my mom grew up with her in the house; she was emotionally unstable and physically abusive. But Mom has also talked about realizing with hindsight that great-grandma was probably dealing with mental illness and depression. Mental illness and neurodivergence didn't appear out of nowhere in the 2010s, after all, and my great-grandmother didn't have access to medications, therapy, or even a diagnosis. So... she went untreated, got worse, and inflicted trauma and abuse on her daughter and grandchildren. And then on the complete opposite side - my great-grandfather was caring, kind, and just generally awesome. He worked the night shift repairing tools for shipbuilders during WWII, and when he was eating his midnight lunch he always left crumbs for the workshop mouse, until it eventually got comfortable eating out in the open next to him. He was a communist, a union construction worker for most of his life... So yeah. Turns out even though societies change, the people in the past were still just people. They were kind and cruel, they fell in and out of love, they got sick and felt sad and struggled with gender and sexuality, and if you talk to them about it they generally have some pretty cool things to say. Like, one of my greatest regrets is never getting to watch Defunctland with my grandmother, because she was a huge fan of roller coasters and saw a huge chunk of Disney history, and it would've been really neat to hear about it from her.
Thank you for making such a well-produced and evidence-based video. Ageism against older adults is a serious problem - especially marginalized older adults. All of your arguments were reasonable and presented in good faith, and I agreed with many of them. However, several times that you brought up a legitimate major hardship faced by some percentage of older adults - particularly financial precarity, mental illness, and self-harm - I could not help but wonder, "Their cohort has it bad _compared to who?"_ In the United States, aren't Boomers as a cohort financially and mentally far better-off than Millennials and Zoomers? If these issues affect Boomers as much as - if not less than - younger generations, then I see little reason to single out Boomers' suffering. To be clear, I do not think older adults - or anyone else - deserve to suffer in any case. I agree that "we should be helping everyone right now," which means working to improve Boomers' quality of life too. I want every Boomer to retire happily without working a day more than they want to - with a nice house and community to care for them. (I also wish we could cure aging so they would not need to endure any more suffering from physical deterioration, but that's a separate conversation.) But like most Americans in my generation, I still harbor a lot of resentment against Boomers. I feel resentment against white US Boomers for their voting patterns, reactionary ideological tendencies, effect on US culture, centralizing/hoarding wealth, and what they have done to the climate. I harbor resentment not only against the white Boomers _in power_ in the US, but the Boomers _who put them there_ -- including Republican voters. Telling me to just be angry at "the elites" (as if that term even means anything) or "the capitalists" will not cut it. I have less in common with the average working-class Boomer, a Christian who never graduated college and thinks being gay/trans is a sin and/or mental disorder, than the average 1%er in my own generation. It seems slightly inconsistent to explicitly discount these sociocultural differences to focus on economic class with your "more in common" point, only to discount economic class and focus on how different social groups were marginalized when you (rightly) condemned the romanticization of the mid-20th-century economic prosperity of the white US middle-to-upper class. With all of that said, I really am grateful that you decided to address this topic and push back against the often-oversimplified generational warfare narrative - one that I probably overemphasize.
Thank you so much for this. It's terrifying how people who seem to understand privilege and intersectionality so well just lose all ability to do so when it comes to the elderly. They don't even notice that they've unconsciously adopted the same "useless eaters" attitude that capitalists and fascists hold.
If I had a child who was smart enough to see through the wool of culture war and gather that a better slogan than 'OK boomer' is 'OK capitalist,' I'd die of pride on the spot.
18:24 *sitting between two fretted string instruments* ... *Proceeds to pull out secret third fretted string instrument* I know this wasn't a joke in itself but for some reason this really made me laugh.
When people treat aging as sad or being older as being out of touch, I wonder how they can think that when there’s a healthy community of gamer grandmas on RUclips, or when older queer folks or parents of queer folks become parents and grandparents to the young queer people who are isolated from their own families, or how older people that might have more free time or “old” hobbies so often end up participating in mutual aid. Yes, there are a lot of older people that feel hostile to younger people, who have regressive politics, who go against their class interests, or who are at the top of hierarchies. But there are also so many older people who are so involved, so loving, and so marginalized by the same systems (and different ones) that we are. So many of us are stuck feeling isolated from other generations, and to go along with that is to agree to capitalist subjectification, to say it’s okay for them to isolate us from whole generations for the sake of encouraging us to consume and discouraging us from organizing with the many people around us who could join us.
Thanks for the video - it's changed my perspective a bit, one that was largely driven through personal relationships with family that are cooked to say the least. Lots of food for thought here. In other news, is that a wooden mortar and pestle on the bench?
Spot on a always. It's so refreshing to have someone with the same views as me.... Appreciate you taking the time to cover these subjects. Sending love & light to you and your loved ones...and everyone here ✨💙✨
You're back! With a video! Awesome! ...it's not that it's been that long, but every video is a delight. And yes, the way elderly people are sometimes treated when institutionalized breaks my heart. I really liked this video.
I've been reading the comments, and I wanted to share my experience with one of my grandmothers. She was a huge help to my parents all through my childhood as she lived close by and would often pick me and my siblings up from school and walk us home and look after us until our parents came home from work. Later in her life, she developed senile dementia to a point where she would call several times a day, asking the same questions, not being able to remember that we had already spoken. It was heart-breaking because she couldn't help it, and it was so hard not to get annoyed with her, and she could feel and was hurt by this, but she was just lost and afraid with her memory failing. We got her into a home and for a time the communal living with social relations to other people her age and the caretakers there made her get a little better. But though the place wasn't the worst, it had issues, and she was definitely infantilized. I loved her a lot (though I found her rather stern, when I was a child), and though we, and especially my parents, saw her regularly, she was definitely lonely. She had outlived all of her friends. She died shortly after her 100th birthday. ...I think, what I wanted to say is that it can be hard to not get frustrated, when cognitive decline gets in between you and an older person you care about. And it's all too easy to get frustrated with them, though they can't help it. So, I guess, try to remember to be kind.
Okay, you got me. I was a bit skeptical at first but you make a lot of good points and point out the truth (no matter how uncomfortable it is for us leftists). And tbh we seriously needed to hear that. I've seen my Lolo in a nursing home which was also a rehab center (the latter is what he was there for). It was downright dreadful and depressing. It's understaffed, the atmosphere was drab. I really felt sorry for him. I ended up imagining my older years I can be in the same situation. (And since he didn't say anything bigoted about my gender nonconforming appearance and still treat me the same way he always had, as his cherished grandchild, I actually felt some sympathy for him and not for him to live out the rest of his time in a nursing home). With ethnic families, we end up taking care of our parents as we get older. And for my Filipinx family we did the same for my Lola, and doing for my Lolo. But we're also experiencing the stress of a world and places where it's not very accessible for his disabled body. Finding a caretaker is hard since it's expensive and the family can't afford it. And we also have limited time to take care of him because of work, school, and just taking care of ourselves. I keep thinking of ways the system can (and should) help out the people it's supposed to be serving, and having welfare services would be a plus. And you also point out a good point that the 1% is intergenerational now. Makes sense because of old money and new money. Also your daughter is adorable and smart for coining okay capitalist. Totally using that from now on. And have to also say, great video essay!
I feel like the queer community is good at appreciating older adult queer person and yk it’s maybe not that deep but a lot of gay people describe their aesthetic as a grandma/grandpa style and i feel like it comes from an admiration of older adults. An important step forward would be to focus on seeing them as individuals and be aware of their needs and harmful prejudices. I think it’s defintley possible for many in the community to feel solidarity with them if we raise awareness about the issue, like this video, it has taught me a lot about the subject certainly! It really made me change my mindset from seeing people of my dads age as an other
This is a really good point, like the boomers we see in the news are jerks but there's so many who are isolated from us/society and it's not fair to blame them for the handful of politicians/billionaires who've ruined everything
Thank you so much for this! I organize with many seasoned feminine-identifying activists who are still at it in their retirement years (into their 80s). It is so inspiring to hear their stories from over the years and to see them blending simple leisure in retirement with continued activism and mentoring us "younger" folks (I'm almost 40, but feel quite green in my organizing skills). And in a community that is inclusive, multiracial and multigenerational, we can support each other, young and old, parents and childless folks. It's not entirely my communist ideal, being in a place where systems do their best to oppress and exploit folks, but it's a small taste of what may yet be. ♥️
I mean, we also put elder care into the hands of families. Issues of disability and ageism (both young and old) are incomplete without talking about caregivers - with empathy. At-home caregivers are often family and loved ones with disabilities of their own. Caregivers are either upheld as saints or assumed abusers until proven otherwise. Rarely is their actual talk of improving the lives of the caregivers, or how improving their quality of life will often reflect well on the disabled.
absolutely stunning video as always, the talks were fantastic and interesting! i've always been skeptical of the OK boomer thing but it still helped me appreciate aging a bit more.
I really wish that there were better communal living options for adults / older adults, especially those of us who don't have (and don't intend to have) children. I wish that "communal homes" weren't so stigmatized and badly taken care of, because honestly? The idea of living in a small apartment around a communal living space where there were lots of other people I could socialize with, play roleplaying games with, cook with, go on outings and errands with... that sounds AWESOME. And if I could start it NOW, as someone who's almost 40, then by the time I reached my older adulthood I've have built these decades-long relationships with people in the community, which would curtail the loneliness A LOT. Alas, "live with your nuclear family" is the default now, and "live with a bunch of other adults in a communal setting" is hugely discriminated against, to the point where it's not even really seen as an option except for the most vulnerable.
I think this is really potentially a great way to go.
Isn't that substantially what the ancient Epicurians (and later, the Christian monks) kinda did?
@@somecuriosities It's possible -- I don't know all that much about the Epicureans. What I will say is that in "Western" society today, if you even suggest, "I'd like to set up an old folks' home but for people of any age", you'll probably get either weird stares or incredulous laughter, which I think is a crying shame.
@@juliegolick I mean, we're really talking about how you might go about making a kind of commune right? What's to stop a bunch of people getting together and forming a housing association that reconstructed say, a inner city square of flats, into a communal living space?
@@somecuriosities Some friends of mine and I are actually in the process of long-term planning for this right now, actually. We've got four of us who have decided to go in on the communal lifestyle. That said, it would be a lot easier if there were already an organization set up to allow this (like a community living centre) and we didn't need to setup the infrastructure from scratch.
My whole family works in elder abuse prevention and anti-ageism (it’s kind of our thing). This is the first time that I’ve seen a content creator engage with the *entire* definition of ageism in good faith. Thank you.
Whoa! Cool! Sorry that your evening's RUclips entertainment became all work related tho
That's incredible your family is doing this!!! Do you have a website or social media account? I used to work helping disabled adults, which I loved but I was very sick and I actually realized I'm disabled and had a breakdown and no more work since. I'm still healing. I have been laying on acupressure mats for years now and it's the only way I'm alive now. My severe pain has blocked further compassion for everyone and everything that I will reach and live fully embodied in when I get more healthy! God Bless your Family and all who have been helped, and may help reach everyone who is still waiting 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
I visit patients in care homes and I will tell you that they are, (with some exceptions) some of the most miserable places you can be. The nurses in care facilities are terribly exploited and forced to work in appalling conditions and they are paid poverty wages. Many of the patients are mean and violent and racist and nurses are expected to tolerate their abuse. The work is backbreaking. They're forced to work extra shifts and overtime because it's often so short staffed that if the nurse leaves they will be held criminally liable for abandoning the patients. I have seen nurses lash out at patients or handle them roughly- it's no wonder they do.
That's so awful. It's a huge part of the systemic problems with care facilities in Ireland too. It's heartbreaking
My mom (who is also a boomer) was
s an ambulant nurse until like 4 years ago and like she loves the job but like she came home bruised a few times.
Like either because people with dementia got scared and started flailing or some were just really bitter.
Its a hard job that's tremendously underappreciated both in payment and social connotation.
Her job didn't have to be this hard. Like if elderly people who have limited mobility with decades of life ahead of them who are distanced from their family for whatever reason still had options to do anything except sit at home and watch TV, especially also hang out with people they actually like, they wouldn't feel abandoned.
Also like washing a person who cant move autonomously as a singular person in your fifties... that shouldnt be a job, you need help for that.
@@simsamtimtam It really doesn't have to be that hard. Sometimes if a person is violent, you need several people to to assist or often there's that one person who works well with them. But- and idk of you're in the US- but a lot of these places here are owned by corporations that manage a hundred facilities and whose goal is to have the fewest staff possible and pay them as little as possible
I have several scars from the nursing home patients I had, many have serious psych problems and are very violent; you think meemaw isn't a threat til she's got her claws out and is covered in shit and you have to magically clean her up with no restraints. I've had shit, piss, and blood in my eyes from working in long term care; long term care is a dumping ground for patients with the most needs who get the lowest care due to staffing and for profit nursing home budgets, it's a fate worse than death.
My mom had to fight off a few people in her career because they were afraid of black people touching them. "Don't touch me you old ape." Heard that a lot from her growing up
I, and a lot of young leftists, really needed this callout.
Thanks for being as intelligent and honest as you always are, and I am forever grateful for the work you do.
This is all fine and dandy until you realize that class boundaries neatly follow generational lines. Of you want to source unearned wealth, the majority is going to come from white boomers
I was born in 1995. I'm an engineer working in a manufacturing plant, where the majority of hourly laborers are much older than me. Not all of them are leftist, but all of them are struggling. Many of them commute two hours both ways. The idea that I have more in common with the mid-twenties child of a billionaire than with my coworkers is laughable.
Last time I was out grocery shopping, I was behind an older adult in line and the register and bagger were both older as well. They were all talking about how hard it was to find work and that they expected to retire "when they were six feet under" and it was some of the most depressing shit I've ever heard.
Oh that's so hard.
My mom made me aware of jobs stating physical abilities such as being able to lift a certain amount or stand for periods of time etc as a way to ward off older people. I always thought it was about disabled people. It never occurred to me that it excluded people going through the natural part of aging.
I feel comfortable saying I'm a leftist but I also admit to falling for the hype. It absolutely should be "okay capitalist" and not "okay boomer." We leftists need criticism as well and to hold ourselves accountable.
They always say 'Okay, Boomer'
They never say 'Are you okay, Boomer?'
I'm 53 and increasingly concerned with whom I'll age alongside and in proximity of. At least a couple of older friends have re-closeted themselves, so that they can live a bit safer. A couple of others have looked at their circumstances, figured they have a very small amount of time left, and have burst from various lifelong closets in glorious FUCK THIS SHIT fashion.
We're trying to have each other's backs as best we can. It's rough. I don't think I've ever felt as punk as I do now. Lots of fighting to do, in the cool and difficult way. Thanks for talking about this smokescreen. It's important.
That's all so so fascinating. I think the whole world of older queer life is just underrepresented in our discourse. And that doesn't help anyone.
Thank you for commenting
I'm 54 and as an lgbtq+ person it's disheartening that I will never escape people hating me for who I am. I'll keep being me, but 54 isn't that old of an age either way imo. Keep thinking I'm weak world. Still here, still queer.
"I feel guilty about 'why didn't we figure it out earlier'"
Don't feel bad, Sarah's dad. Oil companies had it figured out in the 70s but they suppressed the information.
The ideological conflicts that arise when taking care of the elderly sometimes make this extremely difficult. I remember a pretty formative experience when I was 14, I decided to do groceries for the 84 year old lady who was living alone in the apartment below us. She invited me for tea, thanked me and said: you have some beautiful eyes, they are mirrors of the soul you know?" Then proceeded: "I do hope you don't have any jewish friends because they'd ruin you"
As I was aware this elderly nazi had 0 power and was living in almost complete isolation, needed care and yet, I felt I was betraying my beliefs and friends by helping her.. It wasn't something my 14 year old brain could cope with... and ehm.. I'm still not sure how that situation could have best been resolved within the community.
Same with homophobic societies outside the west, I avoid older men like the plague.
This is an issue that I'm grappling with as well. A year or so ago I heard the only grandpa figure in my life say that all queer people should be kil**d (for context, I'm a bisexual and (largely closeted) non binary person living in a country where most people are not even bothered by statements like this). A few months later I found out he had stage 4 cancer and might die anytime so in a way by hardly ever visiting my grandparents I risk having a person who loves me to his core die without seeing me one last time but visiting my grandparents causes me intense discomfort due to how homophobic he (and the rest of my family tbh, although they're not as violent) is as I know he wouldn't love me if he actually knew who I am. Older people who are as wholesome as those in the video are extremely rare and although I do believe people don't deserve to die lonely and neglected it's also incredibly naive to think that talking to them is likely to be a largely positive experience without doing everything in one's power to avoid any and all political topics. Even if one can learn a lot from them, oftentimes it's more of a dreaded responsibility rather than something one can enjoy unless they fit the communal standart of what is acceptable perfectly
@@miglek9613 I'm sorry you're in such a painful predicament. I think it's best to do what makes you feel the most loved and cared for. It doesn't sound like your family provides safe space for you, and it's okay to grieve or feel hurt even if/when you take steps to remain distant (or not let conversations go Too Deep). I hope you have other people in your life to help.
That hits close to home. :/ After years of estrangement, I discovered my elderly father had at some point fallen head first into the hole of conspiracy theories, antisemitism etc.
I now live with a person who's literally shaking at the thought of finding someone to talk to, and what they most want to talk about is the jewish conspiracy to reduce white population of europe, break up traditional families by pushing diversity and LGBT "propaganda" and so on and so forth. (which is "great" for me, personally)
No, he's not a right wing Christian, btw, he's extremely anti-religious and seems to mostly support pro-Russian slavic nationalism. He thinks he's anti-capitalist, but like...functionally his opinions fall under some flavour of fascism and fervent anti-americanism.
And there's some cognitive decline already, substance abuse...Shit's hard sometimes.
I would show up with a support friend, come out in the most flamboyant way possible, and just drop that in their lap. If they only “love” you if you’re straight, they already have the wrong mindset and simply getting them to act on it won’t change anything.
"Hey, it's [seniors care facility]. We found your mom unconscious and non-responsive again and called an ambulance. Also we're evicting her because this keeps happening and we don't want to deal with it anymore. She lives at the hospital now."
"Hey, it's [hospital]. Just to let you know we discharged your mom, who doesn't know where she is and doesn't know she doesn't have a home, a few hours ago and she's still in front of the hospital. Can you do something about this?"
... it's 10am and I need a beer.
Hearing someone of that age say "if you're a decent person, of course you're a socialist" makes me want to cry. I think my life would be a lot richer and less isolated if I had older leftists like this to talk to, but I just don't.
This feels like a terrible take. there's barely 100,000 reds in the country. If the number of people that are decent are so low, why stress ourselves to help these ghouls?
@@ericmcintosh6167 because helping people is a good thing? Because when people feel better and have better lives its easier for them to think about others and not be so bound up in their own torture.
@@ericmcintosh6167yeah, I’ve noticed that even w my abusive centre-right step dad, the best approach for both of us, is for me to tell the truth and leave when I can’t take any more. He probably doesn’t even deserve my time, but insulting him only makes things worst.
Although, talking to him, usually doesn’t reveal very much. Capitalists are frustratingly predictable and uncreative.
There’s more of us than you think! I’m in my sixties, but please don’t confuse me with Fox News viewers just because I happen to be straight, cis and white! Unfortunately, the right has a very loud voice in the media. I’m hoping to see a move toward more compassion-socialism-as younger generations take over. I’m tired of rich old men making policy that doesn’t even affect them.
I’m ex NHS - I was a true believer.
I’ve done loads of voluntary work, mostly around the elderly, but they just shut it all down here. I go to church, I cry when puppies get rescued, haven’t eaten meat since the 80’s….
Am I nice?
Tbh I’m enjoying this channel despite the fact I’m now very much on the right and have been for decades.
I look back with embarrassment on my hippiness. How deluded I was.
I should have watched that Russian fellah that explains leftism is communism, and I should have read the Gulag Archipelago when it came out.
“The older I get, the lonelier I become.” Tell me about it, I’m about to be 31 and while I’m married I don’t have kids but even so between working, errands, household chores, hobbies, and being tired _all the time_ maintaining a social life has become basically impossible.
It's absolutely a thing!
Other thing I want to bring up here, I worked for unemployment through the pandemic last year and the discussion about job security is really true. I cannot tell you the number of older adults I had to try and help who were let go first because they had been with a company for decades but all their management saw was their hourly & insurance cost, and were now stuck because they couldn't find work because of their age. No one wanted to meet their old wage, no one wanted to handle their insurance, no one wanted to take on the "risk" of older workers who could get sick or have an accident or was "only going to be working a few more years" and you could here it in all of them being like, "So what, am I supposed to just die then?", because it was that, or work as a Walmart greeter at like a tenth their old wages, lose their homes & all the equity the built up in them, get bled out, and THEN just die. Aging right now under capitalism is brutal for everyone and age has its own unique horrors that we will not see till then, and we need to listen and take them in, cause they want out of this bullshit as much as we do, and if we can't help them what the fuck is going to happen when we hit that point?
Cause, I don't know about everyone else, but the old folks homes sound like a nightmare I'd look to avoid, and that's before we talk about how they bleed away all your assets just to keep you there, leaving you in a situation where the longer you live the less you can leave to your family, so that it's preferable to die quick so that your children & grandchildren might have a house to live over having nothing & having to figure out how to pay for your funeral.
That makes for some grim but necessary reading. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this.
@@TheLeftistCooks np. The first time I ever broke down at unemployment was on one of those calls when I realized this old woman might die in her house and the last person she would talk to is me. And it was all because a boss saw her paycheck, and her insurance costs and was like, she's who's expendable.
And I think about how my grandma was in a home and the thing ate her house to pay for it. At the time of her passing my brother had his first kid and a second on the way and was still renting. I remember him talking about wishing he could buy it, and how off it was that we couldn't move into this place we used to spend every other weekend at because our grandma had the gaul to want to stick around and meet her grandkids at 92 rather than pass away before they ever got here. I've had to talk with my own Mom about that a lot since then, and ALL OF IT feels like something we all shouldn't be having to do.
Why does a system that forces us to choose between poverty and starvation or sending your elders out into the woods to die need to continue to exist?
This was both awful to read and extremely necessary, thank you so much for sharing this.
I just wanna guzzle my avocados in peace, I don't mind if older folks join in.
As horrible a mental image as "guzzling avocadoes" is, I will fight for your right to do so.
I have to share a short personal story; TLDR- I witnessed and participated in elder abuse at a former job.
I was born in 1995. I am a nurse now. This takes place in a rural/suburban town in Iowa. One of the jobs that I worked at during my few years in nursing school was the largest local nursing home in my area. I went into this job as a young(er), starry-eyed, bleeding heart nurse’s aide. My very first day on the job was surreal: the local news on the TV was discussing the approaching dissolution of Iowa’s state ombudsman department. “The Ombudsman Department” in Iowa was specifically tasked with advocating for the disempowered population of nursing home residents; every nursing home resident is disempowered by the way.
One of the first tasks delegated to me by my RN(nurse) was to keep a resident’s cigarette in my pocket. The RN called me to the desk, physically inserted the cigarette into my scrub top pocket, and told me:
“this is ‘Ks’(a resident) cigarette. She asks for too many a day. The doctor’s order says she can have 1 cigarette every hour during the day. Keep it in your pocket for the next 15 minutes, then it will be okay to give it to K.”
This task felt like some sort of hazing ritual. Very strangely to me, K was standing near us, watching and listening as the RN put her cigarette in my pocket and ordered me to withhold it from her for the next 15 minutes.
I was dumbfounded. I had no idea what to do- it was my very first day as a real caregiver. I decided to walk down the hallway away from the desk and K. K followed me and started to literally cry as her old body tried to keep up with my young body. I felt very uneasy. I didn’t want to disobey orders or get in trouble. Neither did I want to torture a woman whom I’m ultimately tasked to caring for. This was my first day. “Surely not every day is like this?” I thought.
As I’m walking down the hall, trying to escape K’s anguish, an ombudsman turned the corner and stopped me. She asked what was going on. I explained. She then looked me in the eye and asked me:
“Do you think that this is the right thing to do?”
I replied: “This is my first day. I’m following the orders that were given to me.”
In response the ombudsman said: “I think you should just give K the cigarette.”
I did give K the cigarette. She stopped crying, and started heading to the nurse’s desk to retrieve a lighter from the RN. I went further across the hall to help someone else, and also to get away from that situation. A few days later, at the end of the week, there were no more ombudsman in the halls or in the building at all. There were no more ombudsman in the state.
During my year at this job I witnessed and learned many things about empathy. I have dozens of similar stories that I could recount. I moved up to the Alzheimer’s unit after a few months. Like I said, I have dozens of terrifying, humbling, enraging, and hopeless stories that I could tell. I felt that most of my coworkers simply ignored the humanity of the job in order to cope with the intensity of it. I ended up quitting after witnessing much neglect, trying to speak out, and barking up the entire chain of command, to no avail. This was the culture that had been cultivated here. I was powerless to change it, though I tried.
I’m a registered nurse now myself. Things aren’t much better in hospitals. Things are certainly different, but much of the culture is like that of the facility I came from: especially regarding the elderly. I really do understand the desire to separate from the humanity, from the empathy, of working in our modern healthcare system. It’s almost necessary just to stay sane. Maybe I’m too much of a bleeding heart or too sensitive or too optimistic, but it really hurts to see how this system treats people. It’s infuriating to realize that there are those ‘at the top’ of this system who profit immensely from it. I’ve been forced to withhold care because of insurance technicalities. Both the patients and the caregivers experience their own forms of disempowerment- and it hurts us all, deeply.
Today I practice to be the best caregiver that I can possibly be with humaneness as my core principle. I’m not perfect, but I try. I hope that in some way I can help this system change into one that is focused on the people as human beings, instead of as products and statistics. I hope that others will too.
Thank you for sharing. ❤️
I too was born in 1995. One year in school, I applied for the available summer jobs, and one of them got back to me. An old people's home. I learnt one thing from that place, and it is that I would rather die younger.
The people staying there had nothing to do. Once a week someone read to them from some book. It was supposed to be for half an hour, I think, but usually ended up only 15 minutes. The food was bland and mass produced, and as an aspie most of it was far from appetizing. At least one person staying there was spending a lot of time in the bed, and the workers didn't change their diaper until a certain amount of time before relatives would visit. They claimed the reason to be "they would just soil themselves again".
Even if I was a kid, I feel bad for not helping them. I merely came and went, no whistleblowing or anything. I did have plans to "step up my game" and read to them or something, but before I had the free time to do that one of the residents said something about my body that made me pretty much hide away for the other half of the summer job instead.
I'm not a caretaking person, even if I'm an advocate for caring. These places need to be so much more than they are. There are so extremely many social issues and even if I devoted the rest of me to one of them, it would be like a mosquito trying to change the course of a spaceship by crashing into it.
Being a CNA in a nursing home working an average of 70 hours a week and doing administrative jobs on off hours to try and make things better for several years showed me that it's impossible to fix the American Healthcare system, it's a meatgrinder. As a RN now in critical care, it's also a dumpster fire. It's hard to reconcile what you want to do and what is possible with purposefully limited time and resources to increase profit for administration and shareholders. I love nursing, I hate "Healthcare".
The cigarette story is a clear example on how we remove autonomy from institutionalized people. Normally it would be up to the patient to decide if they wanna reduce cigarette intake. This decision was clearly imposed with complete disregard as to whether patient felt it was worth it or not.
It's the end of their lives dammit let them live how they want...
I paused halfway through this video to give my grandpa a phone call. My grandmother died about half a year before covid and he's had to deal with that isolation on top of isolation caused by covid, so that's not easy for him. I do call him sometimes, but not enough, really. It might not have been your intention, but thank you for pushing me to give him a call again.
That's so so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing with us.
Covid lockdowns were a scam and a deliberate isolation attempt.
One of the things that makes it hard for me to approach this topic with an open mind is that my grandmother was a consistent source of emotional and religious abuse towards me and my family for my entire life, up until the point I cut her out of it. It is hard for me to listen to people talking about how we need to do more for these groups without thinking back to that situation where the respect and social power of an individual ruined a good chunk of my life simply because she had really shitty ideas that included everyone around her being her servants and agreeing with every belief she had. It keeps me wanting to conclude that a lot of the harm that befalls older adults is because of how they behave. But I also know that's not the full story, even if it is definitely part of it, and that it is important to stay lucid as a victim of abuse so I don't begin to blame everyone who even looks to be in a slightly similar situation to my grandmother.
I also worked at an elderly home. I'm gonna go full name drop because the place still exists and it was almost every nightmare you hear about. DePaul was the parent company, Woodcrest Commons was the actual facility. Unsanitary kitchen conditions (where I worked cleaning dishes and would regularly be chastised for taking too much time despite the fact that when anyone else cleaned them they would have ) , aides that didn't help the residents do things like move back to their rooms when they need assistance to move at all, aides that swore at the residents, people not getting their meds on time, sundowning patients being left to their own devices when just a little bit of kindness was enough to calm them down (personal experience speaking, I know that's not the case with every incident of sundowning)... The list could probably go on if I decided to sit here and hour and scour my memories, but I think everyone gets the point. The only comfort I have about that place is that I got out before I found myself mirroring the behaviors of my coworkers.
It may be true that few people are truly innocent of abuse. But that doesn't mean those people deserve to be abused. This is a cycle that we must break if we want to not continue it in our own actions and the actions of others. I hope anyone who has experiences that mirror the first paragraph reads to this point and understands what I'm trying to say. No matter what problems you might have with those elderly adults in or around your life they do not deserve abuse, and if they propagate abuse it is likely that they themselves received similar to the abuse they propagate, and the perceptive biases baked into humanity make this very easy to forget.
I hope this gets at least a zillion views.
"Class warfare, not generation warfare."
Thank you!
I've always found it interesting that people think gen Z is progressive and informed if only because where I grew up the majority of people I knew were far right - like extremely so
Remember The Wholesome Grandma!
It's so true. These movements have existed for generations. Someone had to be part of them. When we act like we're the most informed and moral, not only is it arrogant and all kinds of rude, but we spit on the people who have worked to make this world better for decades upon decades (even though there are always valid and important critiques). We all make our choices, and we make them every day. To deprive anyone of this truth and reduce them to a monolith is dehumanizing and actively works against liberation. We all deserve a chance to act in service of a better world.
This isn't aimed at you, for the record. I'm just writing out some thoughts.
Remember: Boomers were at Woodstock. They’re not all shitheads, some of them were doing LSD and gay shit
Brilliant. Thoughtful. And filled with hard truths. How we treat the older people in our community is a good barometer of how we treat the rest of our community. Thank you Sarah and Neil for starting this discussion.
And thank YOU Atom for gskkdkdkdbdjdkdkdkdnfkfkkdekee djdkdkddkfooflfkcmdnenens
What a lovely video. My grandfather developed alzheimers and it was really frustrating to see him go from an adult to someone people essentially treated like a large toddler. I remember trying to have a conversation with him and people would tell me that I needed to talk simpler or he wouldn't understand me. It always felt wrong that he had to go out that way. I wonder if a lot of the distancing from older people is partially guilt. That we know we're mistreating older people and rather than facing that we'd rather just not think about it.
Hi Sam. That's such a good example you give. It's sad and I can imagine it must have been very hard.
I think you're right in terms of guilt. The data we found pointed to people's anxiety around their own ageing being a pretty cut and dry factor in whether or not they'd hold ageist beliefs.
"Fear of death makes people assholes." - I dunno, some German existentialist probably
(an unnecessary, bleak addendum past that tiny bit of parasocial euphoria:
My job requires me to talk with mostly older, female adults with low proficiency in English. Also, my job requires me to talk to a bunch of health professionals.
Professional protocol offers the smallest of windows to offer kindness to people who are literally letting you know that their mental problems outweigh their physical health one. You can find kinder inflections, warmer choices of words, better ways to ask, small chances to let them talk...
Immigrant older women, often without any scholarity, often illiterate, dragged by bonds of marriage to a hostile, unintelligible land, left alone by the lives of their offsprings and the death of their loved ones.
As far as I know, we didn't have boomers in Latin America.
You will stumble upon older people washing windshields for coins here.
Tell me what the fuck "okay boomer" means outside the Global North.
...sorry. Thank you for saying it, Neill.
Gracias.)
Jesus fucking humbling Christ. That may be bleak but it's honest and eye-opening. Thank you so much for sharing.
@@TheLeftistCooks worth sharing it here. It's a kind place.
Honestly what does "OK boomer" mean anywhere.
I think for a lot of people their main interaction with older generations is their older family members who have been horrible to them, or who they couldn't have these conversations with. And it can be hard to separate bad personal experiences with members of certain groups from generalizations about the group as a whole but it is so important.
I think this is where things like found family and community not bound by blood are so important. I can see that it is not my parents or grandparents' age that makes them so harmful for me to be around, but their beliefs. And these are beliefs they held when they were younger too, it's not related to their age.
I just wish that there were more ways to connect with people across generations. Where I am the main community avenues for this are churches and most are not somewhere I am welcome. I actually know that there is a church here that lots of older queer folks go to, and I would love to get to know them, but I also have too much trauma around church in general. We need more community spaces
I find this relatable but also I never really blamed the older generation as a whole for when I experienced harm from my elders, even tho I felt the harm was unfair. While I remember 'youth v older people' when I was growing up, marketing category generations being opposed to eachother always struck me as weird - weird as in 'boomrrs v millens' is erasing of marginalised people. Agree, intergenerational interaction is so rare cause of the lack of spaces for it. Made harder now with pandemic.
I didn't understand how much people dehumanize the elderly/disabled until I saw how my family treated my grandmother, they would pretend like she didn't exist and wouldn't even reply to anything she said. Like she wasn't a person.
This is very well timed. I'm in between homes (not the bad kind) so i've moved back in with my parents recently. Even though we're all fairly well off, i'm glad my dad stopped watching fox news and basically became a communist over the last 10-15 years.
I don't think anyone really hates literal "boomers" we resent the old conservative judgy and rude people that voted for our current society. I'll hang out with 70 year old hippy any day its just the rest (in America at least) are difficult to tolerate.
Digging this so far, and I'm waiting for the point where Neil brings up the other practical reality of fighting ageism. That we will, all of us, get old, and that if we create a system that divests the old of their autonomy and offers them no safety net, we are dooming ourselves to that same trap and creating a critical point of failure in our own system that we saw coming, for no other reason than because we were at that time participating in the hostility actively or choosing to be blind. Neither answer is good, both of them are growing from the privilege our system places on us as younger, and all of it is again a false consciousness that is perpetuated by and at the benefit of the capitalist system we are seeking to escape. It is as if we have escaped the slaughter, but left the last slaughterhouse still operating, thinking we will not be going there, while we walk up the path right to its door.
It is a foolish thing brought on by our youth, and a thing we must overcome.
Where were you when we were writing the essay??
@@TheLeftistCooks Lol right here. Been unemployed and looking for writing work XD. You ever need someone to talk about unemployment in the states, mechanics design, or do copy edit hit me.
This 100x. We're all future old people. It's mind boggling that people don't realize how absurd this all is. And it's a cycle that starts so small.
Our parents said the cartoons and music we grew up with was bad, then we start doing that to younger people. Because, clearly, MY generation is the one generation that got it all right. Other generations are wrong.
Now, here we are as millennials, blaming boomers for doing bad things economically. Well, guess what, the gig economy wasn't a boomer creation. Neither was crypto. Future generations will think we deserve the suffering we will live under as older people because of the bad stuff a minority of us did.
I trained to become a rest home caregiver because I really love caring for and supporting older adults, but I'm starting to seriously wonder whether I can do this professionally under the current system.
People in my work placement kept telling me to "be more assertive" when an older adult doesn't want to do something.
I understand that there's no easy answer when a person with dementia never wants to bathe or change their clothes, but can we not come up with a better option than either leaving them to suffer without personal hygiene or demanding they submit to our will?
I want to be the good caregiver who really listens and makes people's lives a little better by showing them the respect they deserve, but maybe trying to help within the system will just make me part of the problem.
Thank you so much for this. I am a progressive church pastor and most of my church members are boomers and older. I absolutely love them. For the past two years I have been running a book study with them so they can learn about issues of racism, classism, and lgbtqia+ issues. Their comment over and over again is that they love the ideas and new information and they are happy that someone is finally teaching them the language being used to discuss these issues.
I hear lots of people my age get made at older generations for making statements that were once progressive but are now regressive and I get it. But few people are willing to take the time to respectfully explain the ideas and concepts. Yes, the books are out there, but it can be daunting to wade through if you don't have a guide. So when one of the church teens came out as trans to the congregation, this group came to me asking for a book to help explain the diversity in gender expression. And they get it now!
So thank you. Boomers can be pretty great.
Thank you, Sarah's Dad & Neil's Dad, it was lovely to meet you both.
babe come quick!! there's a new liberal cook video!
amazing as always 💖
my mum and i were my grandad's carers until he passed (he had dementia for about 10 years). the hospital kept trying to get us to put him in a care home because it was easier on us. now idk about you, but removing a man with dementia from his home of 40+ years and sending him to a brand new environment he doesn't know or understand sounds like a surefire way to make him more confused and upset about everything.
baffles me that they genuinely thought the "burden" his illness put on us was enough of a reason to put him in an environment that would have made him worse.
they way ppl spoke about him while he was ill rly upset me. he was still a person, he still had thoughts and feelings even if they were sometimes obscured and confused by dementia. ffs my grandad was a teddy boy, he literally had the original Rebellious Teenager Phase. ppl know so little about their elders and make a lot of assumptions, but damn it my grandad was such a cool person. wish people bothered to know that about him.
Honestly made me cry and feel the need to rethink how I think about interacting with older adults to see that there area people of these generations who think like this. I mean, I always *knew* they were out there somewhere, but it's hard to internalize when pretty much the only older adults I've personally known have been in my family, and in my family they're all authoritarian conservatives. Hard to work up the courage to build relationships with older adults when this is the image of how I've learned them to be. So this video gives me some hope and I think is hopefully the first step in untangling these prejudices in me.
Helping my mom trying to take care of my grandma has made it abundantly clear how precarious most of our elders are. I do wish a lot of older adults would actually listen to their children and grandchildren a bit more though. We need to be able to communicate and it can often be really exhausting trying to get your parents/grandparents to listen to you. Of course we also have to step the fuck up and listen to them more too and take them more seriously
My grandfather is a republican white boomer but in his life capitalism took away his house, retirement, and the rifts with money broke up his family despite him working multible jobs.
He is a good person at heart. But he's been so brainwashed by tv and his upbringing he has views that actively hurt him.
I've had debates with him to try to get him to get this but he won't. He regrets having to work 3 jobs, but gets mad when I say he shouldn't of had to. He sees himself living in his sister's basement due to money a failure in himself when it really was a failure in society. He's lucky his sister has the money to employ him.
You mentioned briefly how car-centric communities increase isolation.
My grandma passed quite a few years ago at 96, still an active member of her community living in the 1940s-built home my mum grew up in. I worry for my parents in their isolated suburb, as their few close friends and neighbors also age - will they have to move, will they be able to find new friends in a new community, will they be able to stay healthy as they age like my grandma...
I'm able to live for now in an accessible area (of a different city to my parents), haven't owned a car in a few years, but my friends are spread throughout the city where they could find places affordable for them, and our ability to keep in touch is facilitated by our capacity to bike to meet each other. It seems so hard (partly as a neurodivergent person) to build a local community here, and it seems unlikely I'll be able to stay nearby when purchasing an apartment becomes practical.
Thank you so much for this video. It addressed a weird dissonance I've been feeling about leftist discourse around "boomers" and gerenational warfare and my actual experiences with older adults. Like you said, it's not older adults who are oppressing us, it's wealthy capitalists. Also, I know that a lot of younger people have had bad experiences with older adults who have bigoted beliefs, but I think we should really make an effort to talk to them and engage them in discourse. A lot of them want to learn. A lot of them want to talk to you. A lot of them don't want to feel left out or outdated.
The "bigoted beliefs" of older adults, IMO, have been greatly exaggerated. "Uninformed" doesn't necessarily have to be interpreted as "bigoted".
Having worked in healthcare assistance with people with cognitive and physical disabilities of all ages; having seen the good, bad, and ugly of institutionalization by the state when your right to autonomy is a constant negotiation; having seen it as the most likely outcome for the vast majority of us as we age.............. I have always been very uncomfortable with ageist bigotry. Just because someone makes a dumb joke that you don't know how to use a rotary phone or is a brainwashed working class older person doesn't make them your oppressor, it makes them your fallen ally.
I love that framing and will remember it.
This was a really interesting video to watch right after a particular video by We're In Hell about Steven Pinker, and how happiness and wealth is measured. Neil's dad really hit the nail on the head. We have a lot more access to all of the trappings of wealth that are "supposed" to make us happy, but we've had all of the basic, structural necessities for us to be happy whittled away to damn near nothing.
I'm very lucky in my line of work that I get to interact with people older than my parents on a regular basis (less regular now, though, due to .... waves hands about in a vague gesture at everything.) Most of them are right or centre-right in their political leanings, though there are a few lefties in the group, but all, and I mean ALL of them experience intense feelings of political disenfranchisement. They ALL hate what the politicians have done to our province and country (Canada) and they all want change. They just all tend to focus blame very differently, and I've found a huge amount of value in discussing that with them. It's helped me refine my own sociopolitical theories, and I like to think I've helped them see leftie subjects with a less threatening face. It's one thing to have ANTIFA and ANARCHISM prominently displayed to you as a masked, violent threat, and a totally different thing to have the local rural librarian you see on a weekly or biweekly basis say "Oh, yeah, antifascism is integral to my job, and I chose this job in part because it aligns with these specific anarchocommunist ideals."
Anyway, that's a very long way to say I think this video is great, and it may be one of my favourites that you've done so far. Thank you for putting in the effort and time to make it!
Thanks for sharing! And for being a librarian!!! 👍
I just want to share. We as Filipinos,as part of our eastern culture we pay high respect to our elders. Might it be a relative or not. We also take care of our elders and we as Filipinos are known for our extended family ties. Home for the aged centers are seldom and are less patronized here in our country. I think it's the same with other asian countries.
This entire video has a very western lens (mostly on purpose this time) in part because the problem of ageism is exacerbated by certain habits and ideologies of certain cultures within the incoherent thing we call the "west"
Places like the Filipines or - off the top of my head - Japan, seem to do a far better job of looking after older adults in part, it seems, because respect for older adults is baked into the culture? (Maybe I'm making outsider oversimplifications there) But anyway yes you're right, many people from some Asian cultures don't need this lecture!
Thank you for this, it has given me a lot to think about. I will readily admit to carrying a lot of baggage with regards to Older Adults. I'm scared of aging and it is made worse by committing to not having children. Uncomfortable questions about what my life will be like, how will I meet my needs, ect. are so uncomfortable it is easier to hide them away than think about them. But, as you say, we are all going to grow old. It's always so hard to leave a comment on videos like this because there is no one one thing I write can encapsulate the magnitude of work and ideas contained within. All I can say is thanks.
And give a story! We all love stories right?? Living in an economically downtrodden state in the US I was basically forced to work at Wal-Mart after college despite having a degree. I worked that job for 3 years and was sent across the different departments assisting the department managers. My favorite position was working for one of the few and good managers out there in Dep.2 which is body care, shampoo, ect. Well, we had a part-timer who only worked nights who was an Elderly Japanese immigrant woman, she must have been at least 70 by then. Everyone disliked her, said she was rude, slow, ect. Well, I have to say that lady and I got along pretty well because I had studied Japanese at High School and could speak with her, understood her culture. She wasn't mean, she was just not understood by her co-workers. No one was interested in her background, her experiences, and she was isolated as a result. I guess she was slow, but damn she was 70 and still going up and down ladders and carrying 20 lbs boxes of shampoo out to the floor. I can only look back now and say she was likely poor too, or else why was she working at such an age for such a poor wage? 😕 I got out of Wal-mart eventually but I doubt she ever did.
I'm a "geriatric" millennial. (Born 84.) My parents and in-laws were all born in the late 50s.
My mom had a cancer scare earlier this year (benign, thankfully) and my FIL is in the hospital right now, having just had a heart attack today, and he's very sick, although he will almost certainly pull through. He's a very active and healthy guy and this is probably going to make it very difficult for him to maintain the level of activity he's used to. And this is the first time I have really sat with the feeling of these people I love being mortal, and the imminence of their passing (hopefully not too imminent, but today hits home).
Thank you for this.
Wow. That is a LOT. I'm glad to hear it's various levels of recovery all round. Godspeed you all.
I'm glad the video had an impact.
My hope is to be something of a catalyst for at least a few lovely warm intergenerational chats.
The ageism I remember seeing growing up in a rural small town is anti-young ageism. The assumption that if you're a teenager or young adult, you don't know anything and can't make decisions for yourself. My whole life it's been "you're too young to know x" or "speak to your elders properly" not this ageism that's against the old. How do we deal with being belittled for being young without firing back in a way that's ageist against elders? How do we deal with very real hurt and anger they caused us, through their arrogance that age=wisdom and that means they were always FUCKING right about everything in every argument, how do we deal with those bitter feelings of resentment without ageism?
Like I can't knock down the assumption that age makes you superior? In a non-ageist way?
And what about young people who have been abused by their elders? Who have dealt with racism and sexism from them?
Dear lord this video is so important. The borderline eugenic sentiments among many young poeple, regardless of political alignment, is frightening. How does this not have more views???
Because we're a tiny channel! But if you want to share it around it would really help!
@@TheLeftistCooks Already done! May the odds be ever in your favor 😤
"We should be helping everyone, right now." Damn right.
This is SO fucking relevant. It’s hard to disentangle our culturally learned biases and stereotypes from our own thought-out opinions. We get carried away easily. We’re human. EVERYONE is human. Modern day older adults had it rough in their past lives, and it’s damn rough for a lot of them now. In ICUs, hospitals, nursing homes, community homes, etc. these people suffer greatly from ageism. It’s very normalized. All those crusty old grumps are human beings that deserve every single bit of humane respect and reverence as everyone else.
You make some very good points. Even some, where I could reflect on my own blind spots.
But I think your definition of ageism doesn't include the fact that the older generation includes the group with the most political power. Both in voting power and in powerful positions. Therefore I tend to see movements on the basis of old age as benefitting the more priveledged part of the group. As opposed to improving the conditions of the struggling pensioner.
However you still made me reflect on the less priveledged group of elderly who deserve to be treated better, and included in the community.
Great video!
THANK YOU for putting the references in the description - that's more accessible than having to click to another site.
I see folks making subtle excuses for their ageism like "oh, but boomers are racist, boomers are bigoted, my boomer parents were abusive, etc, etc," and... I mean, have folks forgotten that literally every single person who exists ages, like, from the moment of conception? Linear time does not only apply to bigots and abusers and many, many of the older people who we disparage and neglect belong to the very same marginalized groups that the more insulated activists claim to care so much about, and this is regardless of the fact that we should ALL care about older people because older people are Human Beings. (Anyway, great video! I've been waiting for another leftist to finally take on this particular topic, and your work is always thorough and fun to watch, even when it's intense subject matter lmao)
If someone else wants to care for my racist, homophobic, ageist, abusive parents, then by all means they’re welcome to it, but it’s not in any way my responsibility to destroy myself further by continuing to be in the same room as them as they (still) hurtle abuse at me for being a queer vegan polyamorous millennial with a poc significant other.
They can’t physically abuse me anymore, but I’m also not obligated to subject myself to their presence.
I’m not going to actively prevent their happiness or whatever, but I’m also not gonna voluntarily be a part of their lives.
@@CraftyVegan Yes, and that's fine, I wasn't saying "you should put up with abuse from boomers," I was saying "you shouldn't excuse ageism toward older ppl based on the actions of the abusive ones"
EDIT: And this shouldn't be necessary, but I know it will make a difference in terms of how ppl view my comments (and this isn't directed at you or anyone else specifically) but I'm a younger millennial (in my late 20s) and I have been ageist against older adults in the past, and honestly still to this day sometimes. It's something I'm working on, because it's the right thing to do. We shouldn't reduce the members of marginalized groups to the actions of random, awful individuals who happen to be part of the same group. That's what I was ultimately getting at. For example, I'm also a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and if I had a straight friend who'd been abused by some random LGBTQ+ person, I would not want that friend to automatically associate that abuse with LGBTQ+ people as a whole just because their abuser happened to be a member of that group. I would not want them to judge the entire group I belong to as being inherently evil based on the actions of a particular individual. I just think we should all keep this sort of thing in mind.
My old friend that I used to work for just passed away last week. He was a really great and interesting man. An original old hippie. He was part of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 60's.
He spent the last twenty years inventing and building his own instrument. It was three massive pieces that he called the tones and described as part glockenspiel and part windchime.
I worked with him for about eight years and learned so much. I probably wouldn't be where I am today if it hadn't been for Coburn.
While I cannot stand people who are still reading from the Book of Reagan, Boomers are not a monolith. I've known some great ones.
Thank you so much for this video! I’d been baffled for a long time how casually we dismiss older people’s concerns and experiences and normalise their suffering but in my head this category had still been entirely separate from Boomers. The power of labels. I’m really glad you address this narrative of generational warfare that has ‘the young’ pitted against ‘the old’, for instance ‘competing’ for the same houses and apartments according to semi-recent news headlines.
I also found it incredibly valuable to see and listen to actual older adults - which sounds strange, but those not in any position of authority are so rarely given a voice in online spaces. (And you do have cool dads. :)) I’m also realising that I haven’t been around many older people during my 20s, reminding me again how the organisation and design of our public spaces, living spaces, social and family structures (e.g. monogamy + individualism rather than extended families), and careers deliberately separates the generations, pushing those who aren’t ‘productive’ to the margins so they don't 'burden' the nation's workforce. Out of sight, out of mind. And even if you want to care for elderly family at home, few can afford that.
And you’re right, capitalism has an easy job of secluding older people because most folks are uncomfortable being confronted with the idea of ageing and of death, which is only reinforced by the invisibility of older people. Lamenting your own age and ageing and in the process disparaging anyone who is older or looks older is such a normalised practice, even in the presence of people older than you. I never really identified with being a young person but it still took chronic illness to make me stop equating age with deteriorating health. I think if we were better at grieving the loss of our own abilities and well-being we could also show empathy and hold space for those whom we habitually view as being defined by nothing but deteriorating mental and physical capacities. Instead we take our fears of our own unimaginable end, confine them within a group of people stripped of any other characteristics, dehumanised, and exorcise them from our midst in what Kristeva calls abjection.
I'm a gen X trans dude, and was 13 when the aids came about... I remember that all the talk about it frightened us kids before we even thought of having actual sex, and continued to freak us out throughout the 90's. Maybe that's the root of all the retrograde currents we saw after that, and the renewed backwards conservative ideas floating around 🤔.
It is born out of fear of sex. I've been blessed with a slower aging process than my peers, and basically have much younger friends because I don't understand that mindset. But yeah, some boomers are really cool, my best friend is 74 and is basically an old hippie 😝.
I think that by the time we will be old, retirement homes will maybe be more diverse, full of hard rockers, punks, rappers, all those that where already weird and stayed themselves.
Tbh, sex is a very powerful industrial complex in and of itself.
Almost everyone I've seen called a boomer is actually gen-X, which made me very quickly disinterested in the term.
Also ya gotta put your index finger along the top of the knife, that way it's easier to guide so you can chop faster, safer 💖
Something that I find odd but in a good way is how easily I've been able to talk and get along with older people (at work (in a pub that has been there for centuries so the regulars are multi-generational), with family (tagging along to the clubs, fairs and voluntary activities my grandparents do), and when volunteering in a hospital briefly before Covid hit). It might be that my manner of speaking is rather formal and I am out of touch with a lot of slang and cultural references, due to having lived away from my home country for a decent chunk of my childhood and a hyper fixation on only what interests me and not seeing the importance of keeping up with whatever Timmy thinks is cool to say this week (I'm autistic). All of that, and my difficulty discerning when someone is being sincere/literal or not means that I am able to just sit and listen where others would either ignore them or think their mind is acting up. It disturbed me how inattentive and uncaring the nurses at the hospital were. They were likely tired and desensitized to physical and emotional distress experienced by patients, but it felt cruel the degree to which they neglected their patients. Volunteers like me and my peers helped a little (providing company mostly), but we were only permitted to be there for two hours.
I get really frustrated with the amount of my peers who disregard the humanity of any old person they aren't closely related to.
dang i need to address my deep rooted ableism.
I'm disabled & I still struggle with ableism. Internalized, mostly, but I'm also re-examining my assumptions + beliefs about others now too. It's so baked into the culture in N America & a lot of English idioms. So it's a "well...let's keep trying & learning to do + be better as a person" situation for many of us, including myself. I expect it's a lifelong commitment.
My mother (born in the 40s) fell foul to the echo chamber or generational warfare and posted something on FB that offended my niece. I’m in the generation trying and failing to explain both sides 🤔😉. One of my takeaways after watching that conversation with Sarah’s dad was thatI should take friends around to see my mum so they can remind me of the things about her that are actually very cool.
This is such great work - as proven by the spark of discussion happening already. Congrats 🎉!
I truly enjoy the company of elderly people. They have so much knowledge and wisdom despite being wrong about things. They have decades of experience more than me, dozens more friends, and countless decisions that they made in their life. They shouldn't be forgotten or ignored because of their age. No one should.
Came back here to say that this video was probably the biggest inspiration for me to reach out to the older adults in my life. Just recently started a conversation with my grandparents, who have very different beliefs and values than me, and started talking about who I really am and what I believe with them. It was a pretty rough start, and there's still a lot we need to talk about, but I at least feel like there's a decent chance of us having a meaningful relationship for the first time in my life. Thanks for the vid.
Thank you so much for coming back to say that. The work and the leap of faith is all yours to take the credit for. But we're honoured to have been any part of such a noble endeavour.
Loved this vid, Neil! So cool to meet your and Sarah's dads.
Nice video. Reminds me a little bit of LuckyBlackCat's video "OK Boomer: Class War Not Generation War"
This is definitely a really important conversation to have. I think I've been blind to ageism in the past because I have mostly had poor experiences with the older adults around me. From my parents to elected officials to bosses, it's sucked a lot! But it is important to talk about how older adults are horrifically mistreated on a societal level.
I remember in high school one of our teachers made us write an essay about the care of elders in elderly homes and most students rolled their eyes and said "who cares about that?"
I found it appalling
This morning, people were talking about death on the radio as part of a campaign to be able to talk about it more. Of course, the people who were interviewed about dealing with death and grief, were pretty ok with it and had found positive ways to cope. I think that's great, but it also perpetuates the idea that death is something we have to solve, we have to be able to cope and get over it. The problem is that most people find it looming over their lives like a darkness they can't escape. When I volunteer in a local elderly home, I notice the people working there like to combat the stuffiness by making jokes. Sort of poking the other person is seen as a sign of friendship in my culture, but the slight insults aren't always kind and sometimes unintentionally hurtful, and so it's just not my style of treating people. The toxic positivity acts as a veil for the looming death present in the home. Are we supposed to be content with dying? That mindset is what makes people push it away. We can talk about loneliness, we can talk about leaving existence, to other people, and cry. It's ok to not be ok about it. Maybe closeness to death makes it less daunting, I wouldn't know. But it is clear that aging takes it's toll and society just isn't willing to acknowledge how hard it actually hits.
I take care of my older family members even if I dont talk to them about politics
Love that you're covering this topic! I'm a disabled person and and activist- but I'm also poor AF so for a while I worked in a nursing home. First off, we had segregated wings for the wealthy versus the not wealthy patients. There was a different smell when you crossed into the Nice Part™. I saw a lot of ableism, neglect, unsafe practices, and even verbal abuse. It was bad. I was eventually fired for my conflicts with the manager (I work in the food service side) over health code violations. I was told "just use water, it's the same" when I ran out of sanitizer 😖 Peak COVID times too, and we had an ongoing outbreak in the facility which took many lives. I still got calls about the COVID situation up until recently. It got worse after I left 😅
I was born in the same year as your father, and yea, a lot has happened since then.
Discrimination against the elderly is kind of stupid, because that is a group that you will become part of. Young people will, mostly, never change into a different race, ethnicity, etc. But they definitely will turn into a different age.
Yet, somehow, it never feels like that is the case when you are younger, and we keep making the same mistakes.
Being told "OK, Boomer" is really pretty mild compared to what the boomers themselves used to say about those older than themselves. In the first wave of the baby boomers, they used to say "Never trust anybody over 30," and even "killer your parents." And then the tail end boomers (like me). Used to say "kill hippies," and refer to "tired old hippies," and referred to a gay bar that had broken with tradition by having big windows as "the crystal coffin," We referred to marijuana as a "Tired old hippy drug"" (but still smoked it sometimes.). We called older gay men "tired old queens." And on and on. There was even a gay bar back in the 1979s with a sign on the door saying "No fatties, no femmes, no uglys, and of course, nobody over 40."
Therefore, I have trouble mustering up too much anger against the "OK boomer" meme. But of course, you are right. Most of us did not ruin the planet, except passively, by participating in the system as it is, when we had very little choice, the same as everybody of all ages does now. Evan the ones who tried to get off the industrial wheel by moving out of cities, taking up farming, and so forth found out that being outside of cities meant that you had to drive even more
.Some of us were activists and environmentalists long ago and have been ever since. The people who really created the f---ed up conditions that the world is in now were a small minority of the rich and powerful. And yes, every generation produced a new crop of activists, a new crop of apathetics, and a new crop of ruthless members of the Uber wealthy and powerful ruling class.
And yes, young adults do have it worse than we did when young in many ways.
But anyway, I try to not be one of those old guys who complains about"young people today." Not even when I am almost run over by a teenage skateboarder who is riding down the sidewalk while looking at his phone.
Manufactured intergenerational conflict is, as you point out, just another way to keep us from focusing on our common enemies.
I love the subtitles descriptions of the music, like including the tone for musical context and not just saying "music"
Hello. I just watched your video and I loved it so much. Thank you. Subscribed ❤
Edit: I'm the 600th like!
Lovely, brilliant interviews, and love the three generations playing music together. ❤️👍
I've actually pretty recently started working at a cafe with a lot of elderly regular customers. I have a lot of trouble chatting to people I don't really know since I have social anxiety and I hardly ever chat with older people bc I always think that we wouldn't have enough common ground. this has been helpful in showing me that there really isn't so much of a cultural separation between older and younger people, which is something I think I subconsciously knew to an extent but this is making me really face it. I hope this helps me out with chatting to our older customers bc most of them really do seem lovely and I'd be great if I can help them feel less lonely.
the way older people are systematically oppressed isn't really something I'd put much thought into as well and so I'm glad I came across this video bc it's opened my mind up more to being mindful of how older people are treated by the systems in place. so yeah, thank you for this! it's given me a lot to reflect on
This video was fucking fantastic, has really changed how I view older generations. I'mma go call my grandma
Did you say inter-fecking-sectual! That's the best word ever
Every time I watch one of your videos I learn something new. Stuff that I knew existed on some vague level, but never bothered to think about before. Thanks for all of the thoughtful research you put into these videos!
Thank you for the perspective. And for the new meme slogan “okay Capitalist” im gunna shorten it to “okay capi”
so this is how people get to write "first". always wondered that. the commodification of "first", brought to you by Patreon
Except when I fail to deliver an essay early and it's an anarcho-libertarian free-for-all.
@@TheLeftistCooks hahaha. no, then it's a neoliberal free for all. the commodity of being "first" no longer becomes yours to exchange on the market due to your being late, but rather becomes a resource to be mined by technocrats, those monitoring many popular channels with bots, scripts, and so on, competing with one another, evading RUclips's automated and human controls - just to get their stinky cryptoscam (& etc) replies all over your fresh beautiful content.
i know from personal experience anarcho-capitalism is nonsense and never truly exists; whenever we think it does we aren't seeing it but rather fascism or neolieralism.
The beginning of Part 3 hits too hard. I'm 39 & I definitely feel the pangs of not being young. I'm a solitary individual by design (as a formerly picked-on kid who became insufferably cool in my teens/20s) but watching my friends get into bad marriages or jobs, move away just to be equally sad in Utah or just straight-up fucking *die* is rough. My mom is 64 & we're incredibly close but I'm definitely guilty of thinking and speaking in a way that you've made me see is *bigoted* & hurtful. It's so easy to remember how much material success my parents have had that it sometimes slips my mind how much they've lost. My dad committed suicide when I was 16 because he lost his house. My dad, the self-imposed King of Overtime. All that to say, excellent video. Please please please continue making these insightful (and funny) little pockets of sanity disguised as RUclips videos.
This is interesting, but I haven't really seen it discussed about how most of us have been hurt by all (or most) old adults in our lives?
Both of my grandmothers and grandfathers have been using their relative power over me to be sexist and encourage my ed. But whose aren't? Grandparents that aren't homophobic and racist are a dime in a dozen. It's hard to connect to older people when every older person we've connected to attempted to manipulate or abuse you
This is a very sweet sentiment, but many of us have boomer parents who are Reagan Republicans. I know I do. Talking to them about politics is like talking to a brick wall. They admit that I'm smarter than they are, that I'm more thoughtful and educated, and then anytime I say anything they don't agree with, they accuse me of being indoctrinated by the schools.
I've tried for decades to reach them and the best I can reach is an uneasy truce. For some of us, this class solidarity with the older generations is too much to hope for.
I suppose I would advocate that we think of it like any other internalised bias.
We shouldn't assume someone is not on our side based on their being an older adult.
More potential allies and human connections, and less ageism with its hugely damaging various social impact.
@@TheLeftistCooks I guess I had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to this video: "Sure, it's easy to get along with boomers when they didn't loudly and proudly spend literal decades endorsing proto-fascists." There's a huge population among them, especially in America, who are Reagan republicans and are proud of the fact that he laughed at gay people dying during the AIDS epidemic.
You're right that we should look for allies where we can and we should work to improve the lives of everyone and protect the elderly, EVEN when they're awful because it's the right thing to do. But I don't think it's wrong to call out a generation that spent so many years being publicly racist, homophobic, and hating the poor for continuing to be racist, homophobic, and hating the poor.
@@JulietTango exactly, I feel like this is very overlooked in the video. The majority of my patients are Boomers, and my god, racism and homophobia is the standard for them, and I live in a very diverse area. When you talk to thousands of Boomers, the bigoted patterns are definitely there.
@@JulietTango but the generation you're talking about also includes the people they were, as you put it, laughing at. And even more people that stayed away from public politics altogether. And quite a lot of them are still here.
@@glupik1234 many of those they laughed at (gay men) are dead. Not a good take. 😕
Was that your sister joining in on the credits music? That was a really nice ending to a fantastic video.
Great essay as always. It's important to remember that while most rich consevatives are old (because wealth and influence accumulate), most old people aren't rich conservatives and we reject cross-generational solidarity at our peril. I'm a member of the socialist party of my country and most of the finest and most involved members of my local chapter are 60+ and can share stories of organizing with leftists for several decades.
Excellent anecdotal evidence and I welcome it!
And it was my daughter
I'm gonna be 40 this year. I'm a single mom and raising a son with a disability. I've come to realize that not only am I 100% unhireable for any job. I am also completly socialy shunned. I havent been face to face with another human in a friend like way in NINE years. (Living in Utah but not going to church might be a factor). I'm just numb to it now. I socialize online when the world starts to feel unreal.
new viewer here! this video was so so well made and i am definitely subscribing. there’s just something about this video that gives me a great feeling about your channel!
i am a zoomer, born in 2001. my parents were born in the early ‘70s. both came from working class backgrounds but neither having participated in politics or activism. yet nowadays my dad is under the influence of the conspiracy theorist ideology. hearing his views makes me hopeless and sad and scared. so, it was incredibly refreshing to hear your dad and sarah’s dad talk sense!! facts and logic!! it was also a little bit upsetting for me - why can’t i have a cool socialist dad?
but anyway, back to the topic at hand. i’ll admit i know very little about cases of elder abuse other than that of stan lee. either i’m not being shown stories about it or people just aren’t talking about it. so thank you for bringing attention to it, those videos of elder abuse are awful and i hope those people who were abused are in a safer place now.
I for one am excited to watch this video and THEN have reactions to it!
"Enough. We should be helping everyone right now." ❤️👍
I keep coming back to this video. I was lucky enough as a kid to know some of my great-grandparents - I can't really sum it up better than to say, my great-grandmother listened to Rush Limbaugh on the radio, so my great-grandfather would take his hearing aids out and just lip-read what anyone was saying.
My great-grandmother was a complicated figure for everyone in the previous generations - my mom grew up with her in the house; she was emotionally unstable and physically abusive. But Mom has also talked about realizing with hindsight that great-grandma was probably dealing with mental illness and depression. Mental illness and neurodivergence didn't appear out of nowhere in the 2010s, after all, and my great-grandmother didn't have access to medications, therapy, or even a diagnosis. So... she went untreated, got worse, and inflicted trauma and abuse on her daughter and grandchildren.
And then on the complete opposite side - my great-grandfather was caring, kind, and just generally awesome. He worked the night shift repairing tools for shipbuilders during WWII, and when he was eating his midnight lunch he always left crumbs for the workshop mouse, until it eventually got comfortable eating out in the open next to him. He was a communist, a union construction worker for most of his life...
So yeah. Turns out even though societies change, the people in the past were still just people. They were kind and cruel, they fell in and out of love, they got sick and felt sad and struggled with gender and sexuality, and if you talk to them about it they generally have some pretty cool things to say. Like, one of my greatest regrets is never getting to watch Defunctland with my grandmother, because she was a huge fan of roller coasters and saw a huge chunk of Disney history, and it would've been really neat to hear about it from her.
Thank you for making such a well-produced and evidence-based video. Ageism against older adults is a serious problem - especially marginalized older adults. All of your arguments were reasonable and presented in good faith, and I agreed with many of them.
However, several times that you brought up a legitimate major hardship faced by some percentage of older adults - particularly financial precarity, mental illness, and self-harm - I could not help but wonder, "Their cohort has it bad _compared to who?"_ In the United States, aren't Boomers as a cohort financially and mentally far better-off than Millennials and Zoomers? If these issues affect Boomers as much as - if not less than - younger generations, then I see little reason to single out Boomers' suffering.
To be clear, I do not think older adults - or anyone else - deserve to suffer in any case. I agree that "we should be helping everyone right now," which means working to improve Boomers' quality of life too. I want every Boomer to retire happily without working a day more than they want to - with a nice house and community to care for them. (I also wish we could cure aging so they would not need to endure any more suffering from physical deterioration, but that's a separate conversation.)
But like most Americans in my generation, I still harbor a lot of resentment against Boomers. I feel resentment against white US Boomers for their voting patterns, reactionary ideological tendencies, effect on US culture, centralizing/hoarding wealth, and what they have done to the climate. I harbor resentment not only against the white Boomers _in power_ in the US, but the Boomers _who put them there_ -- including Republican voters. Telling me to just be angry at "the elites" (as if that term even means anything) or "the capitalists" will not cut it.
I have less in common with the average working-class Boomer, a Christian who never graduated college and thinks being gay/trans is a sin and/or mental disorder, than the average 1%er in my own generation. It seems slightly inconsistent to explicitly discount these sociocultural differences to focus on economic class with your "more in common" point, only to discount economic class and focus on how different social groups were marginalized when you (rightly) condemned the romanticization of the mid-20th-century economic prosperity of the white US middle-to-upper class.
With all of that said, I really am grateful that you decided to address this topic and push back against the often-oversimplified generational warfare narrative - one that I probably overemphasize.
well said
Thank you so much for this. It's terrifying how people who seem to understand privilege and intersectionality so well just lose all ability to do so when it comes to the elderly. They don't even notice that they've unconsciously adopted the same "useless eaters" attitude that capitalists and fascists hold.
Because those specific people did it to everyone else
If I had a child who was smart enough to see through the wool of culture war and gather that a better slogan than 'OK boomer' is 'OK capitalist,' I'd die of pride on the spot.
18:24 *sitting between two fretted string instruments* ... *Proceeds to pull out secret third fretted string instrument*
I know this wasn't a joke in itself but for some reason this really made me laugh.
When people treat aging as sad or being older as being out of touch, I wonder how they can think that when there’s a healthy community of gamer grandmas on RUclips, or when older queer folks or parents of queer folks become parents and grandparents to the young queer people who are isolated from their own families, or how older people that might have more free time or “old” hobbies so often end up participating in mutual aid.
Yes, there are a lot of older people that feel hostile to younger people, who have regressive politics, who go against their class interests, or who are at the top of hierarchies. But there are also so many older people who are so involved, so loving, and so marginalized by the same systems (and different ones) that we are.
So many of us are stuck feeling isolated from other generations, and to go along with that is to agree to capitalist subjectification, to say it’s okay for them to isolate us from whole generations for the sake of encouraging us to consume and discouraging us from organizing with the many people around us who could join us.
Thanks for the video - it's changed my perspective a bit, one that was largely driven through personal relationships with family that are cooked to say the least. Lots of food for thought here.
In other news, is that a wooden mortar and pestle on the bench?
Yes it is! Making an appearance soon.
Spot on a always. It's so refreshing to have someone with the same views as me.... Appreciate you taking the time to cover these subjects. Sending love & light to you and your loved ones...and everyone here ✨💙✨
Love and light received! And... ...one moment... Reciprocated!
@@TheLeftistCooks Got it, thank you! 😁
That 'editor' bit at the very end though 😂
God I adore that green dress, I'm so envious!
You're back! With a video! Awesome! ...it's not that it's been that long, but every video is a delight. And yes, the way elderly people are sometimes treated when institutionalized breaks my heart. I really liked this video.
I've been reading the comments, and I wanted to share my experience with one of my grandmothers. She was a huge help to my parents all through my childhood as she lived close by and would often pick me and my siblings up from school and walk us home and look after us until our parents came home from work. Later in her life, she developed senile dementia to a point where she would call several times a day, asking the same questions, not being able to remember that we had already spoken. It was heart-breaking because she couldn't help it, and it was so hard not to get annoyed with her, and she could feel and was hurt by this, but she was just lost and afraid with her memory failing. We got her into a home and for a time the communal living with social relations to other people her age and the caretakers there made her get a little better. But though the place wasn't the worst, it had issues, and she was definitely infantilized. I loved her a lot (though I found her rather stern, when I was a child), and though we, and especially my parents, saw her regularly, she was definitely lonely. She had outlived all of her friends. She died shortly after her 100th birthday. ...I think, what I wanted to say is that it can be hard to not get frustrated, when cognitive decline gets in between you and an older person you care about. And it's all too easy to get frustrated with them, though they can't help it. So, I guess, try to remember to be kind.
Okay, you got me. I was a bit skeptical at first but you make a lot of good points and point out the truth (no matter how uncomfortable it is for us leftists). And tbh we seriously needed to hear that.
I've seen my Lolo in a nursing home which was also a rehab center (the latter is what he was there for). It was downright dreadful and depressing. It's understaffed, the atmosphere was drab. I really felt sorry for him. I ended up imagining my older years I can be in the same situation. (And since he didn't say anything bigoted about my gender nonconforming appearance and still treat me the same way he always had, as his cherished grandchild, I actually felt some sympathy for him and not for him to live out the rest of his time in a nursing home).
With ethnic families, we end up taking care of our parents as we get older. And for my Filipinx family we did the same for my Lola, and doing for my Lolo. But we're also experiencing the stress of a world and places where it's not very accessible for his disabled body. Finding a caretaker is hard since it's expensive and the family can't afford it. And we also have limited time to take care of him because of work, school, and just taking care of ourselves. I keep thinking of ways the system can (and should) help out the people it's supposed to be serving, and having welfare services would be a plus.
And you also point out a good point that the 1% is intergenerational now. Makes sense because of old money and new money. Also your daughter is adorable and smart for coining okay capitalist. Totally using that from now on.
And have to also say, great video essay!
I feel like the queer community is good at appreciating older adult queer person and yk it’s maybe not that deep but a lot of gay people describe their aesthetic as a grandma/grandpa style and i feel like it comes from an admiration of older adults.
An important step forward would be to focus on seeing them as individuals and be aware of their needs and harmful prejudices. I think it’s defintley possible for many in the community to feel solidarity with them if we raise awareness about the issue, like this video, it has taught me a lot about the subject certainly! It really made me change my mindset from seeing people of my dads age as an other
This is a really good point, like the boomers we see in the news are jerks but there's so many who are isolated from us/society and it's not fair to blame them for the handful of politicians/billionaires who've ruined everything
Thank you so much for this! I organize with many seasoned feminine-identifying activists who are still at it in their retirement years (into their 80s). It is so inspiring to hear their stories from over the years and to see them blending simple leisure in retirement with continued activism and mentoring us "younger" folks (I'm almost 40, but feel quite green in my organizing skills). And in a community that is inclusive, multiracial and multigenerational, we can support each other, young and old, parents and childless folks. It's not entirely my communist ideal, being in a place where systems do their best to oppress and exploit folks, but it's a small taste of what may yet be. ♥️
I mean, we also put elder care into the hands of families. Issues of disability and ageism (both young and old) are incomplete without talking about caregivers - with empathy. At-home caregivers are often family and loved ones with disabilities of their own. Caregivers are either upheld as saints or assumed abusers until proven otherwise. Rarely is their actual talk of improving the lives of the caregivers, or how improving their quality of life will often reflect well on the disabled.
LOL, "Traditional Irish MSG." Sounds like something my dad would say. He puts wine in the spaghetti sauce.
absolutely stunning video as always, the talks were fantastic and interesting! i've always been skeptical of the OK boomer thing but it still helped me appreciate aging a bit more.