Is It Time for Baby Boomers to Make Room for the 'Rabbit Hutch' Generation?

In deciding to retire from politics, Utah Senator Mitt Romney has issued a challenge to aging Baby Boomers. But will Millennials ever be ready?

When does old become too old? Photo by cottonbro studio:

Senator Mitt Romney is on TV talking about his age, and I immediately think of two things: The Rabbit Hutch and the Republican couple I met while cruising the Caribbean just before the pandemic.

The two Republicans are childless. For them, this is a grief cruise. They have recently lost a parent (his father) and a beloved pet dog. What they hope is that a January cruise aboard this luxury sailboat—the largest square-rigged tall ship in the world— will bring solace, help them heal.

Before getting to the latter, let’s look at the evolving nature of age and provide some historical context for the concept of passing the torch.

Mitt Romney says it is time to pass the torch

He is 76 now. Should he seek reelection in 2024, he will be in his mid-80s at the end of his term. Too old, he says. It is time for the Baby Boom generation to step aside. Time for a younger generation of Americans to take over.

There is an inverse echo of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Senator Romney’s remarks. When JFK said, “The torch has passed to a new generation of Americans,” he was 43 years old.

His predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower, at age 60, was then the oldest U.S. president in the nation’s history. Baby Boomers had only known him as a balding old man. We had textbook knowledge but no visceral awareness that at one time in his life, Ike (as he was known) had been commanding general of the victorious Allied Forces in Europe. That he’d once been as strapping and fit as any other cadet in the West Point graduation class of 1915.

But by the time JFK came along

with his handsome youth, his hatless head full of thick dark hair, it seemed that Eisenhower had always been old. Because that was the only way we’d ever seen him.

When JFK spoke of the torch being passed to a new generation of Americans, he was at the beginning of his term as president. The words felt fearless, courageous. We did not know what kind of things lay ahead, things that might put that courage to the test.

That is what it used to mean to be young. To go forward believing in yourself. No matter what.

When Mitt Romney talked of passing the torch, he was nearing the end of the only term he would serve in the US Senate. His remarks were an admixture of wisdom and admonition—and were decidedly different in tone and meaning from JFK’s.

Photo of the Royal Clipper tall ship by author 2020

This is where the Republicans I met while cruising the Caribbean come in

The husband had voted for Donald Trump in 2016. His wife could not bring herself to do such a thing but did not vote for Clinton either. She described the Republican Party as rudderless. She felt leaderless and lost politically.

At lunch one afternoon somewhere between Barbados and Grenada, we talk reasonably and politely about our differing political views. They live in Arlington, Virginia, work as contractors for the federal government, hold Top Secret clearances.

I disagree with them politically, but we have surprisingly similar tastes about many other things. The husband is an engineer who reads Shakespeare and quotes Henry V. He and his wife enjoy music and the arts. She gets up before breakfast each morning for the ship’s cardio class. I like them both.

When you spend time talking to people about something other than politics, you get a feel for the one thing that seems to be lacking in our supposedly polarized world. Their humanity.

As we begin to trust each other

my unlikely new friends talk a little about the demise of the husband’s father. Like so many others of the Greatest Generation, he too had been tough, rough, and ready once. But when he became truly old, his idea of himself did not change. He thought he could still leap tall buildings in a single bound like Superman. Until one day, his body informed him that he could not.

“What I learned living through my father’s last years,” the husband said, “was that self-assessment is difficult and unreliable. My Dad simply could not see or accept that his body could not keep up with what his mind demanded of it.”

We had that conversation in 2020

But it has come back to me more than once since the cruise ended. I thought about it when a reporter reminded President Biden that two-thirds of American voters are concerned about his age. When asked what his message to them might be, he said: “Just watch me.”

The thing is, we are watching him.

We see the stiff gait and the apparent lapses in speech where he goes off script and seems confused about his own family members. We see him fall from a bicycle and trip while boarding Air Force One.

We see the people on Fox News hitting these weaknesses with everything they’ve got. The president is reportedly competent when the cameras are not rolling. When awakened at 3AM to handle a crisis, he is up to the task. But we don’t see those things. Its his age-related frailty that people see.

“Just watch me” does not seem good enough. Self-assessment—a component of self-knowledge—can be difficult at any age. But especially when the body begins to betray us.

Everyone ages differently

I have an uncle in Chicago, a veteran of WWII, who is sharp and agile at age 100. But I have known people who were old at 30 because something inside them died long before their hair fell out or turned gray.

Some are old at 40 because they preferred cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs to a healthy lifestyle. Still others have aged prematurely because they inherited a gene pool predisposed to this or that physical liability.

Joe Biden (80) exercises regularly but appears frail. Donald Trump (77) eats fast food and seems robust. Diane Feinstein (90) is so vastly different from the vibrant San Francisco mayor I knew years ago as to be almost unrecognizable. Nancy Pelosi (83), having just announced that she will run again in 2024, will be 86 at the end of her next term if she wins again.

Although it was long rumored that Ronald Reagan—black-haired, seemingly hale and hearty—had Alzheimer’s while in office, years before he announced the diagnosis in 1994, this was never clinically proven.

Everyone ages differently. At present, members of government are not required to pass cognitive tests as a condition of holding office. Should that change?

And if the Baby Boomers were to pass the torch, as Romney suggests, which generation should receive it?

The millennials are coming. They are not happy.

If the Boomers were eager to accept the promise of leadership, Generation X met the inherited world with disappointment and distrust. Generation Y with the snarky contempt of Adult Swim and Family Guy. The Millennials, on the other hand, who have grown up with iPhones and the Internet, are meeting it with depression and downright disgust.

If X and Y suspected that the American Dream was in decline, Millennials believe it no longer even exists. Forget home ownership. Forget livable wages after a hard day’s work. Give up the idea that government will do anything meaningful to make the world a cleaner, safer place to live. Do not vote. Politics is for the manipulated, the exploited, the foolish. Nothing will change regardless of which party wins the election.

I am not making this up. I am simply telling you what I’ve learned while reading The Rabbit Hutch, by Tess Gunty.

Screenshot of author Tess Gunty via CBS Sunday Morning. (Fair use)

‘The Rabbit Hutch’

On this particular day, Tess Gunty is wearing sensible shoes, which says something important about her. Her black dress looks strapless but only because shoulder-length hair covers its spaghetti straps. This understated sex appeal is all she gives up in front of the camera. 

This is not red-carpet stuff.  She is not here to show off her privates in a see-through gown.  This is not about her body.  Or the designers who made that dress.  Look at the larger-than-life book cover she’s standing next to as she holds a literary prize at the level of her heart.  The book is called The Rabbit Hutch.  It won the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction.  Also the UK’s inaugural Watermarks prize.  Tess Gunty is its author.

At 30 years old, she is a millennial

This is her first novel.  All the attention is justly deserved.  The Rabbit Hutch is a portrait of America in the time we are living in. The main characters live in the same dilapidated apartment building, located in an Indiana city in the midst of economic decline.

Reading it is like being Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window.  But instead of a Nikon with a telephoto lens, Gunty gives us x-ray vision.  We see through the walls into the lives of the people living in The Rabbit Hutch. 

We see the emotional toll of economic decline.  We watch the “progressive plunderers” push out the poor to wherever the poor go when big money replaces their homes with luxury condos.  We meet an aging couple, quarrelling over mice, a new mother afraid of her newborn’s eyes.  We hear the inner monologue of a young woman whose life goal is to become a mystic.

An American blemish

The novel is set in an “orphaned” city that looks a lot like the South Bend, Indiana, where the author grew up. Like its fictional counterpart, South Bend was orphaned when the automobile company (Studebaker) that had given life to its inhabitants went bankrupt. Although the founding family got out with their fortunes intact, they left behind an environment polluted with benzene and a jobless, rudderless population, prone to suicide and drug addiction.

While Congress argues overs debt ceilings, laptops, and tit-for-tat impeachments, this is what real people are going through on the ground.

Four of the main characters are orphaned millennials brought up in the foster-care system. Their situation is a metaphor for the city itself. They are individualized close-up portraits of what happens when a city is abandoned by the manufacturing enterprise that spawned it. When it is left to the greedy machinations of politicians and developers who pretend to have its best interests at heart. But care only about money, power, and their own comfort.

The novel describes this fictional city as

“another American blemish, one of those disposable expired towns responsible for electing the demagogues who reduce their country to a trash fire. A town that needs a good babysitter. And a lot of education.”

A solidly red state?

Indiana, where these things are happening, is considered a solidly Red state.  In the 28 presidential elections since 1912, it has voted Blue only five times.  It helped put Woodrow Wilson, FDR (twice), Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama in the White House. 

But it went Trump in 2016 and 2020. Perhaps that’s because it was Donald Trump who tapped into the psyche of working-class whites who felt forgotten and disenfranchised by the very economic decline The Rabbit Hutch is talking about. 

 As I read Gunty’s novel, I see that the story is more nuanced and complicated than any story a politician can tell.  The Rabbit Hutch involves us in the lives of the people who live behind the doors of its apartments.  But it also documents the cares and concerns of the disaffected millennials who populate an America that has never felt “dreamy” to them.

At a time when 75- and 80-year-old politicians insist on making decisions for our world, we begin to realize that the new people are not only coming.  They are here. They don’t like what’s been left to them. And they don’t like what they see.

How can you pass the torch to an American generation that no longer believes in America? Mitt Romney is wise enough to see that he does not have answers for the questions the new people are asking. Or the complicated problems we are all facing. Maybe it is right to pass the torch to someone else now. Someone fearless and courageous. Someone smart enough to fix us. But to whom?

Maybe the answer is blowin’ in the wind. We have been in tight messy places before. But the hero with a thousand faces always appears when needed most.

Sometimes it’s a 58-year-old pilot safely landing a packed airplane in the middle of the Hudson River. Sometimes it’s a 42-year-old Black woman who refuses to give up her seat to white folks on a bus. Sometimes this hero is called Nelson Mandela. Sometimes Abraham Lincoln. Ida B. Wells. Amelia Earhart. Mahatma Gandhi. Martin Luther King, Jr.

There’s at least one in every generation. There’s absolutely no reason to believe this hero will skip the Millennials.

©2023 Andrew Jazprose Hill/All rights reserved.

Thanks for reading/listening.