It’s sobering to learn that you’re a member of a high-risk group. As I approach 70, I realize that Covid-19, along with fate, could defeat lifelong healthy habits. Exercise and dietary measures become a cruel illusion. The virus is like a neutron bomb—killing humans, but sparing property—aimed at the baby boomer generation. It could even be coined the Boomsday Virus, one that targets those who remember the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The pandemic’s effects—combined with severe limits on social and economic activities—recall Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday, a political satire about a U.S. presidential candidate who, in response to the nation’s ballooning debt and Social Security payments, suggests that 70-year-olds consider suicide instead of costly retirement. His proposal, called “voluntary transitioning,” is taken seriously enough that the Pope denounces it. Now life is imitating art, as some millennials and Gen Zers are said to call Covid-19 the “boomer remover”—taking “OK Boomer” one morbid step too far.
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