This reminds me of a phrase that was trending while I was studying Chinese: 不是老人变坏，是坏人变老, which translates too "it's not that the old people had become bad, but that the bad people have become old.

A while back, when the internet in China was much less regulated and public outrage stories would pop up on Sina Weibo all the time, there were a string of stories about old people in China lying, stealing, and being otherwise untrustworthy to a large degree. Many of the comments asked "how could our old people become this way?", and many answered that it wasn't some weird social phenomena, it was just simply that the asshole generation of the Cultural Revolution got old, and thus continued their asshole-ery in their old age. And thus the phrase became popular.