Recently, David Lazarus wrote a column titled: Chase let an elderly customer wire more than $600,000 to an overseas scammer. While his intentions we’re probably honorable, his story was the equivalent of Biden releasing strategic oil reserves to bring down gas prices or blaming the meat packing industry for inflation – great for headlines that appeal to the sardine-like masses and spark viral social media indignation, but pretty useless at addressing or fixing the deeper problem(s).
The title, and the accompanying story, imply that Chase, or any bank for that matter, is A) responsible for its customers’ poor decision-making skills, and B) that it should be monitoring its clients’ behavior outside of the normal requirements set by State and Federal legislation. Mr. Lazarus leads one to believe that banks should require their staff to question the transactions of its customers based on previous financial behavior, perhaps screen for altered mental states, and push back on elderly customers’ requests if the teller feels they are out of character or unacceptable.
First of all, the last thing we want banks doing is shouldering the responsibility for our financial health. Their two responses would be, A) GO INTO LOTS OF DEBT!, and B) Nope, sorry, you can’t take that money out of your account, we feel it’s not a good idea at this time for you to buy a home, have a child, invest in your own business, adopt a puppy, etc. Take a moment and really think about a world in which banks determine when, how much, and for what purposes, you can access your own money. Scary notion, isn’t it?
Secondly, have you tried to interact with the elderly, especially those of the Boomer Generation? I don’t think even a bank manager makes enough money to be required to question a Me Generation member on their financial decisions. Can you imagine the temper tantrum a Boomer would have if a bank manager, much less a teller, dared to question their transactions? Just consider for a moment the destructive, condescending hubris of Me Generation politicians like Biden, Trump, Powell, Fauci, Feinstein, Pelosi, McConnell, Graham, Murkowski, and Collins just to name a handful. They think they are smarter, superior, and infallible. They are the first ones to throw a hissy fit when they don’t get what they want, or if someone questions their motives or actions.
Harken back to the early days of the COVID pandemic when members of The Villages in Florida declared they’d rather die than give up hand-shaking and cruises so refused to lockdown, wear masks, or take COVID seriously. No one questioned them. We sheltered at home trying to Flatten the Curve while they went back to tribal casinos, church, and hosted house parties.
Or even back to Spring of 2021 when it was finally Our Turn to get the COVID vaccine after deferring to first responders and the elderly all winter. The ME Generation had already taken off their masks at Christmas and resumed their lives – casinos, travel, restaurants, church, book clubs, and all things indoors with a selfish abandon and confused indignation at others still wearing masks. Case in point, my daughter volunteered at a library bookstore and was all too happy to get back to doing something outside of the house after a year on lockdown. While we waited for our turn to get the vaccine, we still religiously wore a mask everywhere – even while walking amongst people outside, and definitely indoors. My daughter wore her mask indoors as she restocked shelves with used books and helped out where she could. One day she was confronted by another volunteer, a woman in her seventies who talks incessantly about the retirement home she lives in with her husband (retirement homes being known transmission centers). This woman took umbrage with my daughter continuing to wear her mask while she herself wore none and roamed the stacks jibber-jabbering about the rude staff in her retirement village dining room, her stupid children who wanted her to sell her empty home vacated to move into the old-folks home, and the lazy person she’d hired to walk her dog. She was so offended, she acted as if my daughter choosing to wear a mask was somehow an attack on her decision not to. It never occurred to her that my daughter was protecting herself from this woman. She confronted my daughter and said with no sense of shame, ‘You know, you don’t have to wear a mask, I’m vaccinated.’
And that sums up the Me Generation in a sentence. My daughter was wearing a mask indoors because A) she’d only just gotten the vaccine at the time of this confrontation, and there was a lot of uncertainty about its efficacy and we all had a better-safe-than-sorry policy, especially indoors, and B) the Me Generation had ripped theirs off with no consideration to the health consequences for the rest of the world who hadn’t been able to get the vaccine or weren’t eligible yet. THEY were vaccinated, THEY had been protected, and wearing a mask going forward was all about protecting THEM! It was completely lost on this woman that we were all wearing masks to protect ourselves from THEM as they bee-bopped around the world while many of us were still waiting for our turn. It was completely lost on Boomers that SARS2 can be spread by vaccinated people to everyone, vaccinated or not. Many of them are so full of themselves, they think that once they got the vaccine they were safe and that’s all that matters. They can’t grasp the notion that A) vaccines are not shields – you can still carry the virus, get ill, and transmit the virus, and B) hundreds of millions of people, including 100 million American children alone, had NO ACCESS to vaccines until well into 2021. The Boomers simply did not care. They wanted their lives back, they wanted things back to “normal” and woe to anyone who challenged them.
But if you need more anecdotes about the Me Generation that prove only the most masochistic would want to interact with them on any meaningful level – I’ve got those.
They all follow the same script. A Boomer does something questionable, a child of theirs asks questions, the Boomer acts like a spoiled five-year-old and declares the child is abusing them.
If Lazarus can provide one anecdote about a woman who got scammed as justification for demanding Chase be held responsible for her losses and the prevention of future scam losses, I offer a list of scenes that have played out in my real life, above and beyond what we’ve witnessed as a nation under the leadership of Trump and Biden and the US Congress, that prove one confronts a Boomer at their own peril and better be ready to endure maddening frustration.
In general, my mother-in-law has done some sketchy things even back in her sixties – given out her personal information (name and phone number) to a stranger at a gas station who professed interest in buying her 5-year-old Lexus (this was circa 2008), left her three grandchildren (ages 8, 7, & 5) outside a store at the mall while she doddered off to find a bathroom, and randomly called my husband one day to ask for his social security number because she ‘had a woman (a total stranger) who’d come to speak at her church in her dining room filling out documents for an annuity and needed to give her the social security numbers of her beneficiaries’. These episodes appalled us and forced us to evaluate letting our child be alone with her, but which, in our society, barely rose to the level of a shoulder shrug when relayed to our peers who mocked us for being worry-warts. We live in a world where people refusing to follow their own rules during a pandemic is the norm (See: Gavin Newsom, Steve Adler, Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex), so it’s kind of hard to point out when Nana might need to have a wingman when interacting with the world. But let’s dig a little deeper into some of the circumstances our elders put themselves in, which we can do nothing about, and like Chase, can’t possibly be held responsible for because we would be vilified for daring to suggest Nana and Pap-Pap might need supervision.
Example 1: This recent story in which the author lauds Bruce Willis for discussing the medical diagnosis that lead him to retire from acting and admits her own father has dementia but STILL HAS HIS DRIVER’S LICENSE like it’s perfectly normal. A doctor has diagnosed her father with dementia and, one can assume, allowed him to carry on driving a car. Digest that for a minute. There is, to my knowledge, no breathalyzer for brain function. We just have to trust that this man, who has dementia, will know when he reaches a point when he should no longer be driving…
Example 2: The Car. My mother-in-law, when she was in her mid-seventies, “bought” a car. Turns out she’d actually leased it, but she never admitted it. When it was three years old she decided she didn’t want to pay for the three-year service and just wanted a new car. She asked us what kind to get. We suggested the usual safe, reliable, budget-friendly ones – Honda & Toyota. She’d driven Lexi for years, but always complained about the gas mileage (always had to have a 6-cylinder) and maintenance bills, so we suggested an equally well-built, 4-banger in a cheaper-to-service Honda or Toyota. We told her that she could probably get one for a very reasonable price given she owned her Lexus and could use its trade-in value to offset a new car. That’s when she told us she owed thousands in mileage fees on her Lexus (she drives to the tribal casinos multiple times a week putting thousands of extra miles on her cars which is why we told her years before to just buy her cars from now on instead of leasing them). We said, ‘So, then you leased again?’ She said, ‘No, I bought it!’ We said, ‘Why do you owe mileage then?’ She said, ‘My contract says I only get a certain number of miles.’ We said, ‘When you buy a car, there are no mileage restrictions.’ We asked to see her paperwork to see if the dealership was pulling a fast one on her, she refused. To this day, she still swears she “bought” that car. She ended up turning it in, paying a mileage penalty, and “buying” another Lexus. We have no idea what the real story is on this newest car. And we have no idea why she asks us for suggestions when she is just going to do whatever she wants, regardless of how loony it seems.
Example 3: The Will. For years, my mother-in-law has given us cash at Christmas. For years, my mother-in-law has also complained about not having enough money. Instead of pointing out that she could save money by not spending it on gas to drive to the casinos, gambling in general, eating out all the time, buying a new purse every month (seriously, she has a closet full of Brighton purses), and by buying cheaper cars; we just told her to keep the Christmas money she gave us. After the second year of giving her back her money but keeping, so as to not offend her, the small gifts of chocolate and gift-with-purchase bracelets she got from Brighton and passed on to us; she called up my husband out of the blue a few months later and said, ‘Do you want me to write you out of my will?’ My husband replied something along the lines of, ‘Say what now?’ ‘You keep giving me back the money I give you at Christmas, do you want me to write you out of my will?’ she replied. ‘Mom, you do whatever you need to do,’ my husband replied and said he had to go because he knew that discussing any of this would end up with him wanting to stab himself in the ear.
Example 4: The Will Part II. My mother-in-law has a trust. She’s put her investment accounts in it and when she owns a home, it goes in it as well. Her two sons are the executors of her estate and the primary beneficiaries, her three grandchildren are the secondary beneficiaries. Pretty straight forward, right? It’s just one of those things that exists and that will be sorted out when she dies because a lot can change before that happens, no point thinking about the details that might change – a house to sell, investments to hold or sell, taxes to pay, accounts to close. So why is it that one day, out of the blue, she calls my husband and announces, ‘When I die, if you’re already gone, your brother will administer your daughter’s inheritance from me.’ So, let’s unpack that. If my husband dies first, then my mother-in-law goes, whatever inheritance our daughter would be entitled to would be controlled by my brother-in-law (and vice-versa for his kids if the brother should predecease her). I would have to submit requests to him (or my daughter would, depending on her age) to access her inheritance. What my mother-in-law is saying is that I am not to be trusted to be in the vicinity of my daughter’s inheritance if my husband is not around to supervise me, and that my daughter should not have direct access either in case I was to exert undue influence on her and gain access to the money. Even if you could get beyond the slap in the face and chalk it up to, it’s her money, she can do whatever she wants with it, it still begs the question, why did she feel the need to call up my husband and tell him about it? Why not just let it be the rules when she dies, a surprise if you will? What was the reason for the sadistic little shiv-shiv she delivered by making this announcement? And why would anyone want to interact with someone so clearly mean-hearted?
Example 5: Grandma Got Run Over By Her Own Damn Car. We’re still not sure exactly what happened and she won’t tell us, but from what we can piece together and know of her driving habits (she drives with her purse in the foot-well behind her feet and never sets her parking brake), she apparently parked on an incline, heaved herself out of her car, and probably reached for her purse just as the car rolled back as automatics are wont to do when no parking brake is set. We surmise she got knocked down by the driver’s side door as the car rolled back, fell on her back and because of her girth, was scraped along the pavement by the bottom of the door hitting her stomach. She went to the hospital and was released with a nasty road rash on her shoulders and upper back. No one ever called us. She had a friend with her who drove her to the hospital. We only found out about the episode days later when my husband called her to check on her as is his habit once a week or so.
Example 6: Grandma’s Got Cataracts, and Needs Hearing Aids and New Knees. During one of my husband’s many check-ins with his mother he learned she was going in to have an eye surgery. Turns out her doctor had told her months earlier that she needed surgery for cataracts so she was finally getting the first eye done, but was only just getting around to it after going back and forth with Medicare, Tricare (courtesy of her long-deceased husband), and her doctor to get the “better” lenses instead of the ones she deemed the “cheap lenses”. The point is, she was still out driving. Her vision was impaired, her hearing is still impaired because she refuses to get hearing aids, and she’s randomly fallen at least twice that we know of because of her knees, but her doctor and the DMV do exactly jack-all to prevent her from driving. In fact, the DMV just renewed her license by mail because of COVID so she’s free to drive around for the next five years without so much as a once-over by the State. Can we hold her doctors and the DMV responsible for the inevitable accident that she’s going to cause and that the elderly cause regularly? I mean, if the banks are supposed to monitor the transactions of certain age groups, shouldn’t doctors and the DMV be required to protect the public?
Example 7: Investments. She retired at 62, she’s now nearly 80. She’s only got X number of dollars plus her Social Security. In the mid 2000s, just before she retired, she got involved in First Trust Deeds even though we told her they were risky given the housing bubble that seemed to be developing, but she did it anyway. She made good money in the beginning when people were paying their interest, flipping properties, and returning her principle. But then things blew up and she was left holding land in Arizona and Nevada that she literally couldn’t give away. She was retired, no more guaranteed annual income, and she was banking on her investments to get her through the rest of her life. She was invested with pools of other people so everything had to be decided by committee, she couldn’t just sell and take a smaller loss early on without all partners agreeing – and they wouldn’t. No one was getting paid interest, and the principle they’d all invested had evaporated into thin air as the market crashed. She argues she “broke even” which in her mind apparently means over the course of that particular scheme, she didn’t lose any money because she made enough early on to offset the later losses. We’d argue, if she’d just listened to us and stopped the investments in 2006 and put the money in a CD, she’d have come out ahead, but she ignored us. She also had a side hustle going wherein she’d refinance her home every few months and get a kickback from her mortgage broker. It was a scam he’d dreamed up to churn points and we told her so. We tried to explain that every time she refinanced she was paying points that were folded into her new loan and his kickback to her was just him giving her back some of the money she was going to be paying anyway, but she didn’t want to hear it. She was flying high on getting $5,000 every time she refinanced into a new 3-year ARM or interest-only loan – the bread and butter of the Housing Bubble. When it all started to crash down, she sold her house in 2009. We’d been trying to convince her to sell when we did in 2006, but she wouldn’t hear it. ‘They aren’t making land anymore! Real estate will never go down!’ she declared. She started renting after she sold because she wanted to live downtown in a high rise building with an elevator. She refused to listen to the warning signs we tried to explain to her, she knew better and we needed to just shut up or risk her getting pissed and pouting.
Example 8: The House. After bouncing around between multiple rentals for a few years, she finally bought a place in 2014. At one point in her rental saga, she was living in a house on some friend’s “compound” until asbestos was discovered and she had to move out. She then couch-surfed, at 70+ years-old mind you, between friends’ homes for months. We were living out of state and trying to figure out how to stop the insanity from 3,000 miles away. There was no reason for her to be living like a homeless orphan. She had another son in the County, she had plenty of money in the bank and could easily rent or even buy, but she was acting nuts. When my husband tried to talk to her she was evasive and belligerent. When he tried to talk to his brother, his messages went un-returned. Finally, we found out some information. She let slip one day that she was ‘getting her keys soon’. ‘Getting your keys?’ we asked. She came clean and said she’d bought a place but was letting the former owners rent back indefinitely which is why she’d been staying with friends and hopping around for months. The sellers were finally moving out and she was going to get the keys. She wouldn’t answer why she hadn’t just rented an apartment (she had the money), or why she let the sellers live there for months, but we figured at least the nightmare was over and she was going to settle down. Fast forward to 2017 and she listed her house for sale. We thought she was nuts. It was a nice, single level, 1700sf, 3/2. Granted it was in a 55+ community, which we thought was asinine because it limits your pool of buyers when you need/want to sell, and it limits your ability to have guests, including family, stay with you. My husband and I don’t understand anyone who would live in an area that would prevent your family from staying with you in a crisis, but that’s just us. But besides the restrictions and limitations on the house, it was still a good fit for her and it was her life, so we kept our mouths shut. Of course, her being her, she’d done some financial dance with the mortgage. It was some 3-year ARM with a balloon payment and she was trying to get out before the balloon payment. ‘Why not just re-fi into a 15- or 30-year conventional loan?’ we stupidly asked. She ignored us. We asked what her plans were for her next home, where was she going? She ignored us. She sold the house quickly and close of escrow was looming when she called one day to ask my husband if she should rent a place with a carport and no garage. He replied, ‘No. Your car will be exposed to the elements and nature – animals may damage your engine hoses and belts. You won’t like the walk from the carport to your front door in heat or rain while lugging groceries or bags of other shopping. And you won’t have storage space for your boxes of stuff.’ ‘Oh,’ was all she said and said she had to go. Next thing we know, a month or so later, she calls to say she has a new address, she’s bought a new home. We say, “Congrats!” and jot down the new address. Being curious about where she’s moved since this was the first we’d heard of a destination, we mapped it. It was a 1300sf 2/2 condo/patio home with a carport in the same 55+ community, down the street from her old place. SHE’D BOUGHT THE PLACE WE TOLD HER NOT TO EVEN RENT! Why did she ask if she was going to A) straight up lie, and B) do whatever the hell she wanted to anyway?
Example 9: The House Part II: A few months into owning the patio home, her sister came to visit for a few days as is allowed by the CC&Rs of the community. We hear from the sister that the place is jank. The carport is stupid and there’s a problem with the tile flooring that covers the living room. The sister couldn’t understand why she bought this place. We couldn’t either. A year later we started to hear more from my mother-in-law about the flooring issues in her house when she out of the blue tells my husband she’s going to sue the sellers and make them buy back the house. Turns out there is some sort of moisture under the tile that is causing the grout to “fizz” and disintegrate. Today, she is now over two years into this flooring drama. She has spent tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers, depositions, & arbitration. She’s spent hours jacking her jaw with the HOA board, their lawyers, the association gardeners, and a soil engineer hired by someone (we never got a straight answer on who paid that expense). The problem has not been fixed, no one even knows what the problem is because no one has just pulled up the tile to see, and the soil engineer supposedly said the community needs to install a French Drain so my mother-in-law has seized on that and wants that done, and she wants the association to redo her floors, and she wants the previous sellers to buy the place back (which they’ve offered to do, we assume just to get rid of her, but they want her to pay market rent to them for the years she’s now lived in “their home”, to which she sputtered in indignation). She’s all over the map and has a court date in July. It seems nuts to spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of your life fighting a problem you haven’t even defined because you’re so batshit you can’t see the absurdity of it all, and she won’t listen to us at all. All during 2021 we tried to convince her to stop paying lawyers and just pull up the tile, fix the problem, and sell the place during this absurd housing market. She wouldn’t hear it. She would rather spend buckets of money on a legal gambit she may lose. And even if she wins, even if the judge rules the seller should have to reverse the sale, where is she going to go now that everything is insanely overpriced? Should her lawyer be required to stop her from making stupid life choices? Should the judge order her to be tested for mental competency for allowing this circus to proceed? Where is the line between being a stubborn jackass and being mentally unsound?
Example 10: You’re Abusing Me. AKA, The Final Straw. With all of the drama over her house and its flooring issues, my husband had been in the habit of calling her once a week to get updates and make sure she wasn’t getting screwed because the way she told the story, everyone was out to get her and she was just a poor victim; but she’d never give him real details or the ability to talk to her lawyer to find out how to help. He’d called his brother numerous times to enlist his help, but was met with silence. His only option was to stay in touch and try to monitor the situation as best he could. One day, driving home from work, he called her. He tried to get information on the status of her lawsuit, he asked her questions and kept getting the run around – shady answers, sidetracks onto stories about what jerks her friends are or how her sister accused her of being a bully. After about thirty minutes of frustration, he snapped and said, ‘Could you just answer me? You’re making me fucking crazy!’ To which she responded in pure Boomer fashion, ‘You’re abusing me! I won’t allow you to abuse me!’ Once people start throwing around words like that, we’re out…we can’t afford to be accused of elder abuse because some spoiled woman is having a temper tantrum over her own son asking questions about her situation and questionable, to us, decision making.
And if you think I don’t have more examples – let me tell you this story. One of our neighbors is an elderly woman – in her mid-seventies at least. She is known to wander around knocking on doors asking for people to run errands for her. She is also known for sitting in her home, NAKED, with the door open, screeching about how someone has stolen her cell phone. She calls the police during these episodes, but we suspect that dispatch knows her address after all the years of these events and knows she really needs medical help so they only send Fire/Paramedics. On one occasion, an unsuspecting neighbor encountered her in her doorway naked as a jaybird and came to my door, me being a known female, and pleaded with me to help get her dressed so he couldn’t be accused of some sort of elder rape. She still lives on her own. She has no live-in guardian. For all we know, she may have a court-appointed advocate, but day-to-day, she’s on her own choosing were to go, what to buy, and how to spend her time. At least once a month, a fire truck rolls up responding to a call from her. If she decides to give away all her possessions and money to a stranger one day, are we all somehow culpable because we didn’t stop her? Is the fire department? What about the poor soul to whom she gives things away? Will he or she be caught up in a criminal action because she accuses them of theft after forgetting she gave away her items?
We’ve given up. We, like the tellers at Chase, are powerless in the face of the one-two punch of Boomer narcissism and their ability to get away with playing victim when they don’t get what they want. The last thing we want is a visit from law enforcement telling us we’re being accused of some sort of elder abuse. We really don’t want to see these people become victims of crime, but expecting people to intercede is asking us to take on risk we can’t afford because the law is not on our side.
No one, to my knowledge, has defined “stupid life choices” or differentiated them from mental illnesses like dementia in the elderly. I’d argue someone who decides to jump out of a perfectly good airplane isn’t totally of sound mind, but no doctor or judge would be able to legally back that up. Hell, we have people living on the streets we know for a FACT have mental illness and we don’t force them to get help – how the hell is a bank teller supposed to be held responsible for what someone does with their own money? Should only banks be tasked with monitoring people’s actions? Is there a certain age that they should target or should everyone be monitored for “stupid life choices”? Should people be carded before being allowed to wire money, spend money, or sign contracts involving money? Who decides that age cutoff and who decides what a good use of one’s money or credit is? Making stupid life choices is neither illegal nor a definition of mental incompetence. Arguably, doctors and government agencies like the DMV should be the first line of defense to protect the elderly (and the public from them) but their hands are often tied by politicians who don’t want to piss them off their Boomer constituency. At this rate, an elderly person would literally have to crash their car into a bus full of rich people’s children before anyone would believe us that he or she needed supervision. The Boomers would scream abuse of power, government overreach, and rant about mistreatment if politicians suggested, much less passed, laws to prevent them from making idiotic decisions. And since politicians are absolute chickenshits, very few people, and only in the most obvious and extraordinary of cases, will be legally safe from interceding to prevent the elderly from hurting themselves or others.
The Me Generation has always had this attitude that anyone who pushes back against them is abusing them. They get to play aggressor and victim, and no one calls them on it. They get to drive well beyond the time they should, make batty decisions, lie; and act like entitled, spoiled children – and somehow play the victim when their own stubborn, narcissistic behavior gets them in trouble? It’s Chase Bank’s responsibility to micromanage their financial transactions? Can you imagine what that would look like? Assuming we wanted banks having the power to decide what we can do with our money, who would want to take on Nana and Pap-Pap? Does Mr. Lazarus want to be the one to question the decisions of the volunteer at the bookstore, my mother-in-law, my naked neighbor, the woman who lost this money, or any other Boomer? “Ma’am, why are you sending this money? Ma’am, what are you going to buy with this money? Sir, I’m sorry you can’t do what you want with your money, I don’t think it’s a good idea.” “Ma’am, I’m going to slide this jacket over your naked shoulders.” Do you know how fast Boomers would call the police and scream, “ELDER ABUSE!”? Can you imagine the lawsuits and the politicians showing up to defend the poor Boomers? If Mr. Lazarus wants the job, I’ll be happy to give him my mother-in-law’s number and my neighbor’s address.
In the end, I believe Mr. Lazarus’ time would be better spent asking why it is that this scam victim didn’t have the common sense to question a sketchy transaction, or at the very least to call her daughter before wiring off all that money? Should the daughter be held accountable for her mother’s ego and need for supervision if Chase Bank is? Wouldn’t the daughter know her mother better? Should the daughter have forced her mother to give up control over her finances? Why are employees of Chase supposed to know what this woman’s daughter didn’t even know, that this woman needs to be monitored and managed? Assuming this woman has a stable of doctors as all Boomers do – I mean, that is why we keep them alive right, the income they generate keeping them going with pharmaceuticals and annual tests – why are her doctors not responsible for monitoring her mental state and reporting her to social services for being mentally vulnerable? Why don’t we demand the DMV rigorously test the elderly who want to continue driving rather than just keeping them on the street to maintain the economy of the auto and fuel industry, and avoid the political fallout if a politician were to actually be responsible enough to step in and protect the elderly (and the public)? Why is Chase any more culpable than the people who interact with her in more personal, meaningful ways and who are charged with determining her health and abilities?
For comparison, my grandmother was a teenager during the Great Depression and lived through WWII. She and my grandfather (who passed away in the late ‘80s) took in their mothers during the in-between time when they could no longer easily care for themselves and when they needed full-time nursing care – taking over things like driving them places to run errands and money management. And when my grandmother reached a certain age, even though she was still sharp as a tack and healthy as a toddler, she put her daughters on her bank account, resigned herself to only driving during the day and for short local commutes, and walked or traveled with friends instead of alone – all because she knew at 80+ she was slowing down and vulnerable. She knew she needed assistance and took the initiative to get it. Her own daughters are now in their seventies and have no such shrewdness – they still think they are firing on all cylinders and woe to the person who should suggest otherwise.
No one has the balls to confront Boomers and demand they take responsibility for their social obligations. Too many Boomers were raised to believe they were perfect, invincible, and entitled – those illusions don’t age well, especially when one’s mental acuity and physical reflexes start to wane. Boomers still think they are living in the ‘80s, that they are at the top of their game and no one should challenge them. And no one will stand up to them. I mean, just look at our current president and the man he replaced, and the entrenched, ancient members of our accomplish-nothing Congress. If I was a bank teller, I wouldn’t want the hassle of engaging with someone like Trump or Biden or any member of Congress, much less the associated legal and media fallout once they scream, ABUSE!
I understand where Mr. Lazarus was coming from. My assumption is that he wanted to shame Chase into refunding her money, and that’s a righteous quest given how vile banking executives are; but, and this is a big BUT, I think his time would be better spent calling attention to the cliff of absurdity we’re heading towards as the Me Generation continues to age while simultaneously thinking they’re still forty-years-old and can do no wrong.
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