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In this article they discuss the recent trend on social media reguarding the saying "OK boomer".

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Lyman Stone: The Boomers ruined everything
The death rattle of a meme is heard when some legit news outlet- The New York Times, NPR-takes notice and spies in the meme a cultural signifier, perhaps even a Larger Metaphor. Deep thinkers hover like vultures. The world surrounds the meme, engulfs it, suffocates it, drains it, ingests it. By the end of the week, Elizabeth Warren is using it as the subject line of an email fundraiser, next to a winking emoji. The shark, jumped, recedes ever deeper into the distance. Rocca's segment airs. The meme is finished.

The particulars of the downward spiral change from meme to meme, of course. The end came for "OK Boomer" mid-month, when it was reported that Fox was trying to trademark the phrase for the title of a TV show.

TV-as in cable and broadcast? Fox? With this news, "OK Boomer" was immediately rendered as exciting and cutting-edge as the Macarena. You might as well freeze it in amber. Google Trends charted the ascent and the quick decline.

Having peaked nearly two weeks ago, the meaning of OK Boomer may have already been forgotten by its millions of users. Dictionary.com, the meme reliquary, is here to remind us: OK Boomer was a "slang phrase" used "to call out or dismiss out of touch or close-minded opinions associated with the Baby Boomer generation and older people more generally." The essential document was a split-screen video, seen in various versions on YouTube and TikTok. On one side, a Baby Boomer, bearded, bespectacled, and baseball-capped (natch), lectured the camera on the moral failings of Millennials and members of Generation Z; on the other side, as the Boomer droned on in a fog of self-satisfaction, a non-Boomer (different versions exist) could be seen making a little placard: OK Boomer.

In an irony-soaked era, a word is often meant to be taken for its opposite, and so it was with OK Boomer. OK means "not okay"- OK here means (borrowing a meme with a longer shelf life) "STFU." Many Boomers were thus quick to take offense, since taking offense is now a preapproved response to any set of circumstances at any time. One Boomer even objected to the plain word Boomer, calling it the "N-word of ageism." Once again, Boomers are getting ahead of themselves. No one has yet begun referring to the "B-word" as a delicate alternative to the unsayable obscenity Boomer. My guess is that it will take a while.

Other Boomers, if you'll pardon the expression, insisted that the national disgrace of "OK Boomer" would require the intervention of the heavy hand of the law, lest the injustice go uncorrected. A writer for Inc. magazine, a self-described Gen Xer, earnestly advised employers of whatever age to keep an ear open around the workplace. Casual use of the phrase, she wrote, could be a "serious problem."

"If you have an employee, of any age, dropping the 'Ok, Boomer' line against any employee who is over the age of 40, you have to take it seriously," wrote Inc. 's employment expert. "You can't dismiss it as harmless banter." Indeed, no banter should be deemed harmless any longer without prolonged and skeptical consideration. In the case of "OK Boomer," its bantering might fall afoul of federal law banning discrimination against employees 40 and over. "A joke ... can lead to patterns that create a hostile work environment, putting the company on the receiving end of a lawsuit."

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finished.the particulars of the downward spiral change

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Lyman Stone: The Boomers ruined everything The death rattle of a meme is heard when some legit news outlet- The New York Times, NPR-takes notice and spies in the meme a cultural signifier, perhaps even a Larger Metaphor. Deep thinkers hover like vultures. The world surrounds the meme, engulfs it, suffocates it, drains it, ingests it.

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In this article they portray the boomers vs millennials in a bad way. They are making it seem that each age groups are all going to vote the same way for their group. They say that Bernie will only have younger generations as voters.

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The youths love Bernie Sanders. In poll after poll, the 78-year-old Vermont senator leads all other candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination among Millennials and Generation Z.

That a man born before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor is Millennials and Gen Z's preferred candidate might raise some eyebrows. It's natural to assume that generational change candidates are supposed to look like generational change. John F. Kennedy was just 43 when he declared at his 1961 inaugural that "the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century." And sure, generational politics is probably far too bourgeois of a concept for a democratic socialist seeking to build a cross-generational working-class movement to embrace.

But generational change doesn't have to come from a candidate of the rising younger generations. That's at least what the late political consultant Pat Caddell, the foremost advocate of generational politics, said.

"There's a terrible misconception about generational politics ― that somehow people vote because somebody is a certain age," he said in 1988. Instead, the generational politics argument is that people vote for candidates based on "shared values and shared experiences."

Millennial politicians agree. "Generational change doesn't mean elect whoever is younger," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said on Thursday about her endorsement of Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) over his much younger primary challenger Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.).

That's the sort of thing that Sanders is selling. Two-thirds of his Facebook advertising targets voters under 44 years old - the highest percentage of any of the candidates, according to Facebook advertising data collected by the progressive digital firm Bully Pulpit Interactive. And the time is ripe. The first election in which candidates argued that Baby Boomers should be running the country happened in 1984, when the oldest Boomers were 38 years old. That's how old the oldest Millennials are today.

The Cycles of American History

The concept of the "generation" ― a coherent age cohort with shared life experiences ― was invented in the mid-19th century by European philosophers seeking a way to calculate the ebb and flow of historical change. It's a slippery concept that may or may not mean anything at all. But the obsession with generations found its way into American politics nonetheless.

Franklin Roosevelt told the 1936 Democratic National Convention crowd that "this generation has a rendezvous with destiny." Teddy Roosevelt pushed for the Spanish-American War as a means to test the mettle of his generation in war. And, of course, there was Kennedy.

But it's Caddell who shapes our contemporary understanding of generational politics. After helping Jimmy Carter win the White House in 1976, Caddell decided that the fight over which party would win the votes of the rising Baby Boom generation would define the elections of the 1980s and the future of the country.

Caddell's plan was to contrive a Kennedy replicant for Baby Boomers. This Camelot copy was based on a fictitious presidential candidate - Sen. Smith - Caddell tested to focus groups. Smith was a 40-something senator; a passionate idealist who echoed the liberal patriotism of President John Kennedy, but campaigned on "new ideas" that would break with stodgy New Deal policies of the past.

Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, born in 1936 and not a Baby Boomer, was the first to don the Sen. Smith persona in 1984.

"The fault line of the party is now between those who have been in office for 20 or 25 years and those who have come into office in the last 10 years and who are less tied to the arrangements dating to Roosevelt and Johnson," Hart said.

Hart barely lost the nomination to Walter Mondale and then fled the 1988 nomination fight after he was caught in an extramarital affair. Historian Arthur Schlesinger's " The Cycles of American History" further popularized generational arguments in politics in 1986. And Caddell's faith in generational politics did not waver. He found a new candidate to don the Sen. Smith persona: the then-44-year-old Delaware Sen. Joe Biden.

The choice of Biden didn't come out of the blue. Biden had made the same generational argument for some time and was pursued by Caddell to be the generational candidate in 1984, but declined.

But Biden suffered from the same problems as Hart. Born in 1942, he wasn't technically a Baby Boomer and he didn't participate in the animating dramas of the 1960s ― the protests, the sit-ins, the boycotts, the drugs ― that Caddell thought united the Baby Boom generation. He clumsily oversold his connection to the protest movements of the '60s and then when he tried to pivot from the generational message to one aimed at working-class voters, he wound up plagiarizing a British politician's biography. He dropped out of the race and later said he regretted overselling his Boomer radical bona fides, noting that "wasn't me."

The Baby Boom generation would have to wait for one of their own, Bill Clinton, to take generational control of the White House in 1992. Clinton's advisers repeatedly told the press that they did not believe in the promise of generational politics and weren't campaigning on it. That's because their candidate already embodied it. Unlike Hart and Biden, Clinton had protested, dodged the draft and smoked pot (but didn't inhale). The campaign anthem's chorus, Stevie Nicks singing, "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow," said it all.

Baby Boomers ― Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump ― have held the White House ever since. But neither party ever gained a hold on the generation. Its main unifying generational experience turned out to be division.

Shared Values

As Baby Boomers sought generational change by moving away from the New Deal government intervention policies of their parents, Sanders remained linked to the old consensus. The values he espoused and the policies he pushed seemed out of tune as the Baby Boom generation came into power, but today politics has come back around to him.

His calls for single-payer health care, free college and student loan forgiveness have been embraced by many young voters who have grown up during the slow-motion collapse of the neoliberal economic order.

Millennials came of age in an era of spiraling inequality, booming child care and housing costs, the rise of student loan debt and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Where Baby Boomers' vision of societal collapse was New York City's near bankruptcy, Millennials saw their future prospects dimmed by an overcooked global financial system, the same one that seized power after President Gerald Ford told New York to drop dead. Americans born in the 1980s were 34 percent worse off economically than expected due to the financial crisis, according to a 2018 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis .

It's no surprise then that younger generations have different attitudes about government than those who came before them. They believe that government should be more involved in economic affairs than older generations and favor "Medicare for All" and free college policies promoted by candidates like Sanders. They are more amenable to "socialism" over "capitalism" than older generations. They identify as liberal Democrats at higher rates than any other generation and have the widest partisan gap in favor of the Democratic Party than any other generation. And they prioritize issue positions over electability .

Like Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is in her 70s, but she missed the rightward economic shift of the Democratic Party in the late 20th century. Despite actually being a Baby Boomer, she also didn't have the experiences that Caddell thought defined their generation. Warren dropped out of college at 19 in 1968 to get married. She spent most of the 1970s working her way through college and then law school while raising her children. Warren's entrance into electoral politics in 2012 came in response to the financial crisis that has come to define Millennial life. She consistently polls second to Sanders among younger voters while maintaining equivalent support across all age groups.

And although Sanders may be the generational change candidate for the youth, Biden, today 76 years old, represents a different kind of generational politics ― that of the older generations. His perch atop the polls is buoyed by wide support from voters over the age of 65, but limited support from the young. Thirty-five percent of his campaign's Facebook advertising targets over-65 voters ― the most of any candidate ― while only 16 percent targets voters under 45.

Once the avatar of generational change, today Biden says he was called to run again to put away the demons the Baby Boom generation he identifies with thought they had defeated in their youth. The "contorted faces" of torch-bearing neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, an echo of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1960s, Biden said, forced him to run for president.

"I never thought I'd see something like that again in my life," he declared.

Notice that word, "again." For a generation whose narrative involves successfully marching to end Jim Crow and pass civil and voting rights and fair housing legislation, the sight of the old evils ― fueled by the rhetoric of a Baby Boomer president, no less ― is a call to action.

This is no time to "pass the torch," as Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), a Millennial who briefly ran for president, suggested Biden do. "The reason I'm not passing the torch is because I don't want them to burn their hands," Biden said at a fundraiser on Thursday.

As Bob Dole ran his 1996 presidential campaign as the last fight of the G.I. Generation, Biden's is billed as the last march - the last protest - of his own.
Matt Fuller contributed reporting.

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The 2020 Primary Is Millennials vs. Boomers. Choose Your (70-Something) Fighter.

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The youths love Bernie Sanders. In poll after poll, the 78-year-old Vermont senator leads all other candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination among Millennials and Generation Z. That a man born before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor is Millennials and Gen Z's preferred candidate might raise some eyebrows.

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This article is about how the supreme court has been documented saying the words "OK boomer" to baby boomers. A case of discrimination has been brought up.

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It's official: "OK, boomer" is now part of the U.S. Supreme Court record.

Chief Justice John Roberts dropped the retort Wednesday at oral argument in an age discrimination case, asking hypothetically whether the use of that phrase could be considered evidence under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

In the case before the court, Noris Babb, a pharmacist for the Department of Veterans Affairs, contends she was denied promotions due to her age and gender.

Roberts imagined an exchange during the job application process.

"Let's say in the course of the, you know, weeks' long process, you know, [there is] one comment about age," Roberts riffed. "The hiring person is younger, [and] says, you know, 'OK, boomer' ... once to the applicant. ... Is that actionable?"

His scenario was met with laughter in the courtroom, as the official transcript for Babb v. Wilkie noted.

According to the database of high court arguments, it was the first time the phrase had been uttered at the Supreme Court, the Associated Press reported.

Roberts, whose 1955 birth places him smack bang in the middle of the baby boomer cohort, is father to two Gen Zers ― perhaps where he picked up the catchphrase used to mock his generation.

Roman Martinez, the 36-year-old lawyer at the podium representing Babb, ultimately appeared to satisfy the chief justice by suggesting that use of the term would be actionable if it were used to negatively assess a job candidate.

"If the decision-makers are sitting around the table and they say, 'We've got Candidate A who's 35 and we've got Candidate B who's 55 and is a boomer and is probably tired and, you know, doesn't have a lot of computer skills,' I think that absolutely would be actionable," Martinez said.

Introducing the Supreme Court to intergenerational memes aside, Roberts has a lot on his plate. The chief justice will be sworn in Thursday to preside over the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

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Welcome To 2020: 'OK Boomer' Is Being Thrown Around At The Supreme Court

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It's official: "OK, boomer" is now part of the U.S. Supreme Court record. Chief Justice John Roberts dropped the retort Wednesday at oral argument in an age discrimination case, asking hypothetically whether the use of that phrase could be considered evidence under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

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In this movie they stereotype older people as not being able to take care of themselves. They make it seem as though this is a crazy idea of doing the bucket list. But it also broke the stereotype by having them do such extreme things.

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The Bucket List (97 mins, 12A)Directed by Rob Reiner; starring Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman, Sean Hayes, Rob Morrow, Beverly Todd

The two greatest films about ageing and facing death have, arguably, been made in Japan: Ozu's Tokyo Story, in which an elderly couple come to terms with their grown-up children, and Kurosawa's Ikiru, where a middle-aged clerk confronts terminal cancer. Bergman's Wild Strawberries belongs in their distinguished company, though not many others. Hollywood's record is none too strong, though one of the most moving movie deaths is in Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country when the elderly ex-marshal played by Joel McCrea says, shortly before he dies in a shoot-out: 'All I want is to enter my house justified' (an echo of St Luke's gospel 18:14). This is the remark of a man in a dangerous profession who has led a principled life and has always been ready to meet his maker. He has no need of a bucket list, which is, according to Rob Reiner's supposedly uplifting, inspirational comedy The Bucket List, a list of things you want to do before kicking the bucket.

The film revives that wave of books, plays and films about death that was a major American preoccupation in the 1970s when Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1974, and Michael Cristofer's play The Shadowbox, set in a hospice for cancer patients, won the Pulitzer for drama in 1977. New York psychologist Leslie Farber, brother of influential film critic Manny Farber, called it 'the new thanatology', and a conscious knowledge of that period is shown by one of The Bucket List's leading characters Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman), reciting the five stages of grief in the face of death from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's 1970s bestseller On Death and Dying, namely denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Carter is a 66-year-old motor mechanic, married with three children, an autodidact whose ambition was to be a history professor. Through screenwriter Justin Zackman's plausible contrivance, he finds himself sharing a room with another terminal cancer patient of similar age. He's Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson), the billionaire owner of a chain of hospitals, including the one they're in, that offer a no-frills service to the properly insured. These two make chalk and cheese look identical. Carter is a kindly, soft-spoken, thoughtful, philosophical Christian. Cole is a self-centred, rasping, aggressive, cynically humorous, four times married-and-divorced atheist.

Nicholson famously played the devil in The Witches of Eastwick and Freeman was a convincing God in Bruce Almighty, and the pair play beautifully together. To the early scenes, where their operations and chemo treatment have a grim reality, they bring a greater depth than Lemmon and Matthau achieved in their grumpy old men days. Where the film goes wrong, moving into a combination of black comedy, sentimentality and unattractive fantasy, is when they draw up a joint bucket list of things to do before their imminent deaths.

It was in the land of the free and the home of the euphemism that the term 'senior citizen' was coined in 1938. Where elderly British or European people may start quietly contemplating their lives when age or the grim reaper looms, their American contemporaries tend to huddle together in isolated communities, pretending to be forever young and, when faced with death, engaging in expensive, exotic adventures.

Carter and Cole find a sudden access of dynamic energy and set out to fulfil their dreams and ambitions, piously platitudinous in the case of the mechanic ('to witness something majestic', 'do something good for someone you don't know'), playfully adolescent in the case of the billionaire ('getting a tattoo', 'kissing the most beautiful girl in the world'). They callously dump Carter's concerned wife as if she were the common scold and set off around the world, skydiving, driving sports cars, visiting the Great Wall, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal and Everest and eating caviar on the Riviera.

Carter conspires to reunite Cole with his estranged daughter, Cole works on renewing Carter's marriage. One, we know, will deliver the eulogy at the other's funeral. But which one? All this is made possible by the hospital owner's immense wealth and private jet and the film ends up sticking in the throat, crying out for a tracheotomy.

The most amusing performance comes from Sean Hayes as Nicholson's personal assistant, carefully protecting himself with a precarious balance between sly subservience and comic insolence.

Screenwriter Justin Zackham is currently editing a book of bucket lists in aid of prostate cancer, the contributors 'ranging from Donald Trump to teachers, farmers and children across the globe'.
Topics

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The Bucket List (97 mins, 12A)Directed by Rob Reiner; starring Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman, Sean Hayes, Rob Morrow, Beverly Todd The two greatest films about ageing and facing death have, arguably, been made in Japan: Ozu's Tokyo Story, in which an elderly couple come to terms with their grown-up children, and Kurosawa's Ikiru, where a middle-aged clerk confronts terminal cancer.

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In this article they discuss how convalescent homes are unconsciously dehumanizing the older people that live there. They use terms like q and o to describe different people that live there. The names are for people who keep their mouth open and those that have their tongue out.

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ou see them in most aged-care facilities, seated on pastel-coloured lounges, being babysat by a TV they are mostly not watching. Some are asleep, some are sedated, some are cognitively impaired. Seeing them like this, it's hard to remember they were once young, vital and independent. What's harder is thinking that it might one day be you.

"The staff call them the Os and the Qs," says a seasoned nursing home visitor, describing residents with their mouths hanging open and those with their tongues hanging out.

The staff mean no disrespect, but reducing someone to a letter of the alphabet is just one example of the unconscious dehumanising that happens often in the treatment of the elderly.

Some older people take extreme measures to avoid this kind of lingering scenario: joining Exit International or taking steps to enable them to end their lives at a time of their choosing.

Guilt, shame and despair - often tempered with unspoken relief - colour many children's lives when their parents go into aged care. Contrary to popular perception, it is an option chosen by a relatively small percentage of the population: there are around 200,000 residential aged-care places in Australia - although this is likely to grow as we all live longer.

Quick Guide
How to select an aged care facility in Australia?

The My Aged Care website has a checklist for clients to ask providers:
*What is the mix of registered nurses, enrolled nurses or trained carers?

*What are the meal arrangements ( including seating, times, menus, visitors, meals in rooms, special diets)

*Can they meet special needs regarding language, culture, sexuality or gender identity?

*How are social activities decided?

*Can family and friends stay overnight?

*What transport is provided to shops or for visiting family and friends or for outings and what is the cost?

*Can residents continue to see their own GP?

*What type of care services are not provided?

*What do they do in the case of unplanned weight loss and to prevent pressure injuries?

Thank you for your feedback.

So why have we failed to do better by our elderly needing care? Why do we settle for conditions that leave many of them bored, lonely and poorly fed in a way we would never tolerate for ourselves?

Unlike other prejudices such as racism and sexism ... ageism is unique in targeting our future selves

One underlying cause could be deeply entrenched ageism. It often begins with the language we use. According to writer Ashton Applewhite, if we diminish our regard for the senior members of our society verbally, we are likely to do the same when it comes to the way we frame policy - removing their dignity and sense of agency in condescending generalisations that assume vulnerability and dependence instead of resilience and independence.

Arguably the most prominent anti-ageism activist today, Applewhite is the author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism. Her TED talk on the subject has been viewed more than 1.3m times.

Even the term "the elderly" is problematic for Applewhite. " The implies a homogenous group, when nothing could be further from the case. I prefer the terms 'olders' and 'youngers' which are value neutral and emphasise that age is a spectrum," she says on the phone from her home in Brooklyn.

"I don't feel I can use 'elders' as that is not part of my culture and besides, I don't like the way it implies that age confers value or authority. We have to give up on the bogus young /old binary view of the world."

Unlike other prejudices such as racism and sexism, which are manifestations of fear of the other, ageism is unique in targeting our future selves.

"No prejudice is rational," says Applewhite. "But with ageism, we have internalised it. We have been complicit in our own marginalisation and it will require active consciousness-raising to correct that, just as the women's movement did.

"When you recognise it in yourself and then realise you can come together with others to effect social change, it radicalises you. Stanford University sociologist Doug McAdam calls it cognitive liberation. The next step is collective action. The rewards are real. I hear regularly from people who have begun to reject age shame that they feel instantly relieved and empowered."

One of the reasons ageism is so embedded in our culture and hard to eradicate may be that it expresses decades of accumulated and deep-seated fear.

Consumerism urges us all to "fight" ageing as if it were a battle we could win, even though we know in our hearts that's a lie. Mantras like "70 is the new 50" emphasise the need to be vigorous and vital for as long as possible, yet offer no alternative scenarios for those with degenerative diseases, loss of cognition or suffering from loneliness.

For those who can afford it, the latter phase of life is marketed as a "lifestyle" promising coastal, gated communities where well-groomed residents play bridge and endless rounds of golf with new chums. But we want those who cannot afford it parked out of sight.

We try not to think too long or hard about how they spend their days, robbed of purpose

We further disassociate ourselves from their needs, delegating their fate to poorly paid workers. When the former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said that those employed in aged care should aspire to better jobs, was he echoing a widely held sentiment? Is the ugly truth that prejudice underpins our complicity in accepting the low status of aged-care staff as one of those inevitable inequities of 21st century capitalism in a country more concerned with tax cuts than social justice? If we held the elderly in higher esteem, would we fight harder for their rights and those of their carers?

Those of us with parents living in nursing homes (rebranded as residential care facilities to sound more upbeat) reset our expectations of what constitutes meaningful living, comforting ourselves with the thought that their basic needs for safety and personal hygiene are being met. We try not to think too long or hard about how they spend their days.

When headlines about neglect, mistreatment or elder abuse appear in the media with increasing frequency, our inner alarm bells ring and we wonder what will be different by the time it's our turn.

Applewhite is encouraged by increased interest in initiatives such as intergenerational housing and friendship networks in the UK, Europe and the US. She is optimistic "because younger people have grown up in a more mixed world and they know diversity is here to stay and that this is a good thing. It's a much smaller ask for them to include age in the quest for social justice for all. And the #MeToo movement has also helped. It's been a catalyst for universal equality. In that sense, activism feeds activism".

"Even Hollywood is getting better; we are seeing more active, positive and sexual portrayals of olders," she says, conceding that a comedy like The Intern, starring Robert De Niro as a 70-year-old widower returning to work at an online fashion company, addressed important issues.

"The workplace is where ageism awareness is definitely on the rise. And while there are genuine challenges to mixed-age workforces to do with retraining and seniority, all the research shows that they are the most effective, especially in the creative industries."

Robert De Niro plays a 70-year-old widower returning to work in the film The Intern. Photograph: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures/AP

Applewhite rejects the notion of intergenerational conflict and says there is no evidence for it. "The fact is baby boomers like myself were born at an incredibly lucky moment; millennials were born at a less fortunate time. But we did not pull up the drawbridge behind us. We are all increasingly hostage to the macro-economic and social forces of unfettered capitalism and a heartless gig economy."

It's a view shared by the late Hal Kendig, professor of ageing and public policy at the Centre for Research on Ageing, Health and Wellbeing at the Australian National University.

In a report written for the journal Ageing and Society on Australian attitudes to intergenerational equity, Kendig rejected the notion of intergenerational conflict as a political ploy used to support cuts in expenditure. However his research found that millennials do feel some resentment that they will not enjoy the same degree of security in terms of home ownership and superannuation as their parents.

What is more significant, according to Kendig, is "the paradox that our sympathetic view of our grandparents, based on real human attachment, does not translate to public policy".

In the final interview before his death in June, Kendig said he blamed the Howard government for attributing the accumulation of the budget deficit to "providing too many benefits for the elderly. Fortunately the public fought back and resisted taking money away from pensioners, so there is a limit to our tolerance of such policies, especially among women and groups who are vulnerable in terms of their health and social resources".

"As far as governments are concerned, aged care has always been a minor issue, but it will come to matter more as more of us need to access it and live longer. To date, government has been unwilling to raise taxes to address this. Meanwhile the media has portrayed baby boomers as greedy geezers but, while there is no doubt that they have enjoyed tremendous economic advantages, there are inequalities even amongst that cohort.

"Those with a comfortable standard of living tend to own their own homes and have relatively modest expectations. There are lot of well-off people who benefit from the old-age pension. I would want to moderate that."

Anticipating his own death from an incurable degenerative disease gave Kendig the freedom to be outspoken: "I would go further. Unlike the UK, we pay no death duties here. The fairest way to guarantee adequate aged income support is to fund it through that kind of tax. Where is the equity in inheritance? But it is certain political death to raise that."

Like Applewhite, Kendig believed that ageism is a contributing factor in determining social treatment of the elderly. "We see them as less capable. The attitude in northern European countries is more enlightened, but even there, welfare states are retracting due to pressure on budgets. In developing countries, seniors stay in work longer which means that, on the one hand, they remain integrated and actively contributing members of society but, on the other hand, they are often exploited."

He warned against idealisation of Asian and Indigenous societies as having a greater respect for older people. "We tend to romanticise other cultures as valuing the elderly more than we do, but if we look closely at the evidence, it presents us with scenarios we find confronting. For example, the Inuits value older people highly. So much so that they put them out to die in the snow - at their own request.

Each time we see an older person, we need to imagine them as our future self

"Ageism has been found to be all-pervasive across eastern as well as western cultures, including Confucian-based Asian cultures where respect for elders and filial piety are social norms. It is possible that ageism is one of the main features of global ageing among modern, capitalist nations in which individual social views predominate over traditional collectivist views."

British writer Anne Karpf says we all need to change the way we think about ageing. In her lucid and far-reaching book How to Age, she points out that most people over 75 spend more time looking after someone than younger people do and that much of the research on ageing has, until recently, been conducted in nursing homes where bodies and minds are often lacking stimulation, giving a distorted picture of reality.

Karpf has observed a backlash against the elderly in the UK, who are being blamed by some of the younger generation for Brexit. To counter this and more long-term unconscious bias, she says it's time for "a major gestalt switch". She says: "Each time we see an older person, we need to imagine them as our future self, and rather than recoil from their wrinkles or infirmities, applaud their resilience. We need to re-humanise older people."

This is what the Benevolent Society hope to achieve with the launch of a 10-year campaign. The campaign called Every Age Counts launches in October with a multifaceted strategy to "shift norms, expectations, policies and outcomes for all older people". Among their aims: a national agenda for older Australians, including a federal minister with a dedicated portfolio preferably at cabinet level.

Like Applewhite, the Benevolent Society identifies language and attitudes which characterise the issues of an ageing population "as a problem, a burden and a cost", as reinforcing and perpetuating negative stereotypes.

The lengthy 10-year term of the campaign, says age discrimination commissioner Kay Patterson, is crucial to the long-term goal of deep change in the sector, as is the support from younger people.

"We need to enlist young people in this battle too ... they're the ones who are going to create the culture of the future."

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The ugly truth about ageism: it's a prejudice targeting our future selves

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ou see them in most aged-care facilities, seated on pastel-coloured lounges, being babysat by a TV they are mostly not watching. Some are asleep, some are sedated, some are cognitively impaired. Seeing them like this, it's hard to remember they were once young, vital and independent.