Message from a virus-ridden year: Bye-bye boomers
Mar 26, 2020, 10:15 PM | Updated: Mar 27, 2020, 7:08 am
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Is it merely a coincidence that a terrible pandemic that strikes especially hard against those over 70, appeared in the very midst of a presidential campaign exclusively dominated by just such targeted oldsters?
Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — the last surviving candidates — all became septuagenarians well before the virus ever arrived on these shores.
That peril conveyed a message that the aging Baby Boom generation, which had always seen itself as invulnerable and perpetually pre-eminent, might not be so invincible after all.
Whoever wins in November will surely count as the last president born in the 1940s. America has sorted through a long parade of candidates from that same generational cohort: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Al Gore, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump all graduated high school in 1964 or ’65.
Among many other things, this virus-ridden year unmistakably marks a changing of the guard.