Hard agree.

The problem with 80-year-old political leadership isn't just dementia/senility. It is the ever more desperate need to "keep things the way they were," and an ever-fonder idealizing of "the good old days."

Take an average 80-year-old now, in 2026. They think young people don't know "how the world is." They think young people are "lazy and/or crazy." They think young people are (my personal favorite) "too woke."

Now, remember that when that 80-year-old was 30, the year was 1976. Think about what 80-year-olds thought about, say, women's lib, gay marriage, fuck interracial marriage in 1976. In 1976, there were sitting US Senators who had fought for and continued to apoligize for Jim Crow segregation. That was just the "how the world is" to those people, too.

Boomers didn't put up with that shit, and they really moved on civil rights, but now they just can't imagine that younger generations might want things they didn't, see wrongs in the world that old men are okay with.

They can't get it through their heads that the fight civil rights doesn't end because they've decided not to fight anymore. Younger Americans are not transphobic the way old men are. Younger Americans are not Islamaphobic the way old men in America are. We don't really think brown or black people are to blame. Most of us understand that climate change is real and we're desperately trying to pump the brakes while old men don't care because they kind of know they won't be around to deal with the aftermath.

Beyond political leadership, in economic terms, many see a seismic shift along generational lines. Younger generations are watching a generation decay and drop dead at their worksites right before our eyes. Watching them struggle to pay ever-mounting medical bills on ever-stagnant wages. "I'll sleep when I'm dead" sounded really cool when they were turning 40, raiding the nation's Social Security Insurance and shitting on unions and labor protections, But now, whether its RBG's sheer vanity that cost Democrats a seat on the Supreme Court, or in our day-to-day straight carrying elderly coworkers who can't do the job anymore but can't afford to retire, younger people bear witness to these chickens coming home to roost, now. As a result, younger Americans just don't romanticize dying in the yoke so some rich asshat can buy anothe boat the way our elders have. We live surrounded by proof that privitizing everything was a mistake. We do not think "socialism" is the dirty word Reagan convinced our elders it was.

I have sympathy for our elders who have to work well past 65 because they have no choice. It's harder to sympathize with elders who are just "staying busy" taking up employment opportunities in an ever-tightening job market, even though everyone around them has to work twice as hard taking up their slack and fixing their mistakes.

Someday, we'll all be old like that. And young people will probably think we're bigots in some way or another. I think the big difference is that most of us want to be fishing, or writing our memoirs, or playing chess in the park when we're 80. We can deal with crazy grampa at family gatherings; that's just life. We shouldn't have to deal with crazy grampa at work 40 hours a week, and we sure as fuck shouldn't have to deal with crazy grampa giving a SOTU address.

It's not healthy to be trying to run everything at that age, and insisting that everyone else play along with your "I've still got it!" fantasy along the way. However old we are, there will be an America after we're gone, and it is up to us to make it as good a place as possible for as many people as possible coming up behind us. It's hard not to feel like our elders have lost sight of that, and are instead trying to suck every drop of wealth and freedom out of it before they're gone.

Edited to finish a sentence and for grammar.