I'm going to turn 50 in a couple of months, and I've started getting mailings from various Seniors organizations, offering me membership. I got one yesterday that's really kind of scary. This group of senior citizens seems to have forgotten that Americans up to the magic age of 65 and those beyond it are all citizens of the same country.

This organization, which shall remain nameless, proudly claims credit for defeating, quote, "Kiddie-Care" legislation that would have destroyed senior health care choices, unquote. They are against adding non-seniors, aged 55 to 64, to Medicare. They are against means testing, earnings limits, CoLA cuts, and taxes on benefits. Government spending for anyone under 65 is a "give-away" program, cutting into the funds to which these seniors believe they are entitled, despite the fact that today's seniors are taking a lot more out of Social Security and Medicare than they ever put in.

I live in a suburban community mostly made up of older homes and with an aging population. In recent years it has become all but impossible to pass a school funding levy and our school system is finding it necessary to cut important services to our children. The consensus among the parents of school-age children is that our older residents are voting down the levies because they no longer have kids in school.

My parents live in a fairly upscale retirement community where many residents with considerable income from investments and pensions jealously guard their relatively meager Social Security income and make full usage of their Medicare benefits. One neighbor sees his doctor two or three times a week. Why not? The government pays for almost all of it. At the same time, young families with two small incomes and no health insurance are struggling to find a way to provide minimal health care for their children.

It's a question of power. The old have always had more power than the young, due to their accumulation of wealth, knowledge, and personal connections. In years past this segment of the population was fairly small and mostly well integrated with other age groups because they were part of close-knit extended families. Now it's a large and rapidly growing segment, mostly living and associating with others of their own age group. They have the time to organize politically and the clout to petition their representatives for whatever they think is their due. It isn't hard to imagine, with advances in medicine and the size of the Baby Boomer cohort, that there will come a day when Seniors outnumber the rest of the adult population, giving them complete voting control. Before that happens we need to examine what it means to be a responsible citizen in a democracy.

Does it mean that you should always vote for your immediate self-interest? If it does, then we are coming to a divide in which there will be two classes of voters: the workers, living on the income from their jobs, and the retired, living on the income from their investments, pensions, and government entitlement programs. When the latter group becomes the controlling voting bloc and they support only those programs which benefit themselves, there will be no money spent on schools, on nonmedical research, or for the support of families with children. Elected officials will be older and more conservative. And it will be only a matter of time before the working class rebels against the inequities of a system that squeezes them for the benefit of several generations they see as a nonproductive elite.

There are more Seniors today than there ever were before. They are more disconnected from the younger generations than ever before because they tend to aggregate in Senior enclaves and have close contact only with other Seniors, and thus see the needs of Seniors as the needs of their community. If we don't get past this and start to see that the needs of society as a whole require balanced support for all people at each stage of their lives, separation by age may well become more of a crisis in the 21st century than separation by race has been in the 20th. Overcoming segregation by age is a complex issue, because it runs counter to the trends that have become a part of American life. We are a highly mobile society, moving every five years on average. Families tend to disperse as job opportunities draw children to all corners of the map. How do we get people whose lives are so different to care about each other's needs? I don't have an answer, but the question must be resolved before American society fragments into warring factions based on age.

With a commentary for WCPN, this is Marc Myers.

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