‘Thoughtless’ Boomers are refusing to wear face masks | Opinion

Young people are making enormous sacrifices to try and protect older Australians. “Thoughtless” Boomers can at least do this one small thing.

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Today I went to my local Woolies in Sydney wearing a disposable medical mask after the NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, advised on Sunday that everyone in NSW should wear one when doing things like riding public transport or going to the supermarket.

I learned two things on my shopping trip. One, when only your eyes are visible you can really glare at someone and they will damn well know about it and two, I did a lot of glaring, almost exclusively at people over the age of 60 who were defying the Premier by refusing to wear their own masks.

It was astonishing. Everywhere I looked I saw young people – young parents, people who looked like uni students or young professionals on their lunch breaks – diligently wearing masks as the Premier has requested.

And swarming everywhere around them were older people, mostly Boomers aged 60 and above, all mutinously unmasked. I even saw one Woolworths worker, who would have been in her 60s, with her mask dangling uselessly around her chin.

Woolworths requested that all its customers wear masks from last week, so why their staff member would feel exempt is a mystery.

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This person in Harris Farms is doing the right thing by wearing a face mask but many people aren’t. Picture: Gaye Gera/NCA/NewsWire

Why, I thought furiously, are the rest of us bothering, if people in the age group who are most vulnerable to COVID-19 aren’t doing the bare minimum to protect themselves and each other?

It was a similar situation when I spent some time on the NSW south coast last week for work. Older men and women trundling happily around small towns without a mask in sight. Arcade coffee shops crammed with elderly people having their cups of tea and sharing slices of cake – not a mask anywhere.

And it was the same when I put my teenage son on the bus this morning, wearing a mask for the first time. “I’d say only half the passengers were wearing one, mum,” he reported later. “There was one man – probably in his 70s – who was just sitting there with no mask on, eating a sandwich.”

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Young people doing their bit and wearing face masks in Sydney CBD on Monday. Picture: Saeed Khan/AFP

The irony is maddening. We know that older people are at a far greater risk of death from COVID-19 than other groups. In Australia, the median age of death is 85. In the US, nearly 30 per cent of deaths have been in the over 85s and a further 11 per cent in the 65-84 age group.

At the same time, we know that younger people are bearing enormous social and economic burdens in the global fight against COVID-19. Our futures are crumbling into nothingness.

Forty-four per cent of the jobs lost since the pandemic began belonged to 15 to 24-year-olds. Thousands are being forced to abandon a dream – one that was shaky at best in the first place – of ever owning a house, climbing the career ladder or seeing their incomes increase. Thousands more are dipping into their superannuation funds in order to survive, decimating their futures.

In other words, there’s an enormous incentive for young people to keep carrying on with their lives as normal in this pandemic. We are at a very low risk of death, but at a huge risk of economic harm. And there is a very high incentive for older people to take very careful precautions.

Yet from what I can see, the opposite seems to be happening.

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A staff member at Harris Farms in Manly wearing a mask. Harris farm management sent out an email to all customers to wear face masks when shopping at the stores. Picture: Gaye Gera/NCA/NewsWire

In NSW, particularly Sydney, we have been asked to do very little in the fight against COVID-19 in recent weeks, particularly in comparison to our counterparts in Melbourne who are about to endure a strict stage 4 lockdown that will take away so many individual freedoms and futures.

And for the most part we are doing it with good grace. Comments on social media even overwhelmingly support harsher measures in NSW if necessary, with many calling for masks to be made mandatory in Sydney or for stage 3 lockdowns.

And if thoughtless and thankless Boomers keep wandering around without masks on, that may be the path we’re forced to take.

Some may not be wearing them for medical reasons but what about the rest? Perhaps it’s a vanity thing for these older Australians, or a feeling that masks are a nuisance or an inconvenience.

Perhaps they don’t know where to buy masks, although the consensus is that even an ordinary scarf over the face is better than nothing. Or it’s pretty easy to make one yourself.

Perhaps it’s a stubborn refusal for older people to accept the truth of their own age. Asking around my friends, many of their older parents seem to think that the term “elderly” doesn’t apply to them.

“I feel terribly sorry for all the old biddies in the nursing homes,” commented one of my friends’ parents recently, bizarrely overlooking the fact that he is 75 years old himself.

Or perhaps, contrary to the common cliche that young people are all out gleefully spreading the virus in our clubs and pubs and sporting matches, we are much more compassionate, self-sacrificing and mindful of the greater good than we’re ever given credit for.

Alex Carlton is a freelance writer | @Alex_Carlton