The baby-boomer preoccupation with equality may have served many of them through their careers in the first half of their lives. But it is going to undo that service in the second-half of their lives, as they themselves become what they never imagined – passive and dependent. All the freedom they took for themselves is going to disappear, for there is no longer enough social capital or social fabric to sustain it. They do not live among their own people. They live among their own elderly age-cohort. For forty years that age cohort has acted as though it were a community of its own, and so has not been concerned to support relationships with the nation outside that cohort. They can enjoy no community-mediated freedom now, because they never bothered to build that community. They took care to make themselves wealthier than those coming after them. As a result people twenty and thirty and more years younger than they, do not know them. Their children now live far away; they can visit, but they cannot stay, and since they are no part of the neighbourhood, they bring no one new into the house. In the absence of that social fabric, they lapse into immobile old age in a void. Their own friends are losing their ability to travel and disappear into infirmity as they are, all them committed to health appointments, first monthly then weekly until their health becomes their sole preoccupation.
They did not bother to keep family ties strong, because for much of their lives they substituted fake for real relationships. They adopted as their own the relationships and personalities portrayed to them by the media. In the evenings they gaze at these fictional characters presented to them by television with same fondness as though they were gazing at their own grandchildren. But relationships broadcast by the media are without reciprocity, more worship than friendship. Our elderly baby boomers never worked or worshipped or ate or drank together with anyone who now passes their window. Those who pass them now, do so in cars, not on foot on the pavement, so there can be no exchange of greetings. Dog-walking is the only means of striking new up relationships in England now. The social changes they started are now going to roll right over them. They are going to live, get old and die alone, in a society that presently consists only of their own cohort. For each of them, the first of the many lurches down into housebound ill-health will push them overnight into a society of complete aliens, care workers who with whom they have no equal relationship, who owe them nothing and with whom there is no shared culture. The baby-boomers have had their own way. They have built the world in which no lasting ties, obligations or sense of place were acknowledged.
What can they do? They can repent. They can go to church, and spend the remainder of their time there, before the altar, saying morning and evening prayer, keeping the doors open and making welcome all those whom they used to be too busy to acknowledge. There is a choice to be made. They can spend their last months listening to the secular liturgy of radio and television, sitting alone until the ambulance comes for them for the last time. Or they can kneel before the altar, spend their last year in church with the angels and saints and passers-by, praying for the world, being reconciled with those they once spurned and preparing themselves to meet their Lord. They need to choose to curl up before the altar of God if they do not wish to die before the Moloch they have created.
