October 19, 2001

Keri Mulholland

    The age old question of whether or not an old dog can learn new tricks seems to be asked again and again. An Item can be ageless and at the same time be ages old. You can have people who are too old or too young for their age. And then there are those who have to catch up to their age. All these things and more reference our interest in age and the effects of age on our lives. Time is the pressing factor. Many people have too much and some don't have enough. Yet the world goes on and change comes.

    In Detroit the two mayoral candidates have allowed the age factor to be thrust to the forefront of politics and the campaign for mayor. Gil Hill is approaching 70 years of age while Kwame Kilpatrick is just in his very early thirties at 33 years old. Both have said that the other is a weak candidate due to their age.

    Gil Hill has campaigned in part on the fact that his years of working for the city both as a city worker, a police officer and a city councilman has given him the experience needed to run this city in the dawn of this new millennium. Kilpatrick has said that experience is not a factor of age and that he has the experience from his two terms as a state representative and his previous stint as a teacher after graduating from school. It is clear that both have experience in politics and government but what kind, in what quantities and more importantly just how much its worth is yet to be seen.

    A disturbing trend however has been the extent at which Kwame Kilpatrick and his supporters have tried to use the age of his opponent Gil Hill as a means to disqualify the elder for the office of mayor. A repeating theme of his campaign since he entered into the race was that Gil Hill lacked energy and would not be able to serve the city for more than one term. Obviously Kilpatrick ignores the long history of elder statesmen such as Coleman Young, Strom Thurmond, or Ronald Reagan. Regardless of your ideologies they served their constituents well into what is usually the retirement years. So do the supporters and the candidate Kwame Kilpatrick believe that people over 60 cannot contribute to society? Or do they wish that when retirement comes that all those who are still able bodied but past 65 stop what they are doing and move into a nursing home.

    Another frequent statement aired in Detroit by Kilpatrick supporters is that Gil has had his chance. This implies that people are not able to work their entire lives at making things better. This thought is also frequently used to discriminate against those who were incarcerated and released. The men who went into prisons as boys find it harder to obtain employment and another 'chance' at making their own positive contributions to the community. Does this group also feel that older people who are not successful by their definition had their chance and should hand over their company or other property to the youth to allow them to run it as they see fit? On the radio someone recently commented that Gil Hill is on his way down while Kwame Kilpatrick is on his way up. This is more discriminatory talk that says, as you get older you lose whatever status and support you enjoy while younger. This also suggests that the prime years for people are at a certain age instead of allowing one to continue to improve with age. If we were to listen to the Kilpatrick age discussion then Jack Kervorkian would be needed to put older people out to pasture because they have out lived their usefulness to society.

    But it seems that in recent years, beginning in the late eighties and blossoming in the nineties, the 'me' generation took control of public thought. The Generation X crowd who sprung over many baby boomers into the work force and up into the echelons of the nations wealthy forced America to take the young seriously and no longer treat them as though youth denotes folly and lack of motivation. But with their assent they retained their ideas of the aged and the stereotypes that are common among the young.

    Even though this younger age group who now sometimes entered into corporate America straight from high school or many times with little college education they still encountered older workers, people who had been with the company for years and followed traditions of predictability. People who looked at a job with the idea that they would be there twenty to thirty years from the day they were hired. But the new work force took the notion that their happiness laid just around the corner and that today's job is tomorrows old news that the grass is always greener if you just keep looking. They moved from job to job driving up their salary and leaving bodies in their wake. The older established workforce couldn't keep up at first and then had to learn to treat people twenty years their junior as equals on the seniority scale and sometimes had to watch them take the next promotion and lead the company in directions assumed to be the won by the virtue of youth.

    Now that the age bubble has burst it seems that with the inexperience of youth these young firebrands forgot that the country, company or technology that they took for granted was made possible by those whom they treated as being too slow or stuck in the past. The Internet was created and made possible by those now over 60. The fabulous technologies like Fiber Optics and wireless communication have taken twenty plus years to develop and have been in use long before the Internet took center stage. While this younger generation was lambasting the older crowd they ignored the contributions made by the older workers and now that the internet sector is part of the economy instead of the new economy these younger workers now see they must go back to square one and learn what they should have from the beginning. With the technology sector bust and the Internet boom deflated the brief flirtations with youth as corporate leaders is largely over. Now in the corporate sector experience is again what will take a company through rough times. Experience will hold onto that contract even after the company has done everything wrong. The successful in the business world have turned out to be the older generation that was shunned during the nineties. Now the people who are near retirement age are clearly back in charge. Aren't They?

    It wasn't long ago that K Mart fired or laid off large numbers of people who were over fifty. They said it was needed to save the company but proceeded to fill those same jobs with people who were new to the workforce and who worked for half or less of the salary that those just fired were paid. Now K Mart struggles just to retain the customers they continue to loose to their competitors. Many corporations re-engineered themselves, re-organized, downsized, and went through other magical types of change where their workforce did not shrink but changed to a less expensive, younger entity. With the booming nineties and the high flung salaries of the internet stars it was also those who road their coat tails and earned a pittance of any group but was found to be competent enough to perform the same job. These people are now the sought after and the aged are again tossed aside in rough economic times. It is the older workers who built this economy who made the sacrifices and laid the foundation for the robust nineties. It is the older worker who are older parents and grandparents who provide the stability that is needed in a family when the young venture forth for the first time from their homes and try their hands at their own contributions. Without this stability there is chaos and the youth have no wisdom to guide him or her and have no direction or path of which to follow. They wonder aimlessly and contribute more the societies problems than the solutions. And their inner egos and stature of self worth diminishes in the process.

    So how does this relate to Detroit and the race to be the next mayor? There are still a majority of seniors who consistently vote in every election. This is a crowd that is over 60 and doesn't easily identify with the twenty something generation but believe it or not has strong support for the youth and the future. The Kilpatrick campaign has tried its best to define the direction for the city of Detroit in terms of why a young man as mayor is needed. The still growing presence of the Internet, the importance of fiber optics and other high tech devices are being used to tell Detroit voters that Kilpatrick is capable of navigating these technologies needed by the city to prosper throughout the next decade. He makes it appear that the older generation is incapable of understanding and comprehending high technology. Gil Hill on the other hand has not mentioned this as a factor in his campaign. For whatever reason fiber optics does not seem to be on Gil Hill's list of high priorities for the Detroit's next four years. Somehow big and small businesses have managed to be connected to the Internet and establish their presence online without the city's help.

    But the factor of age in Detroit politics has taken a negative tone. It seems that even though Kilpatrick took the majority of votes from all age groups in the September primary, he is insulting the older generation of Detroiters who have been living in the city longer than the young candidate has been walking this earth. It will be a testimony to his leadership if he is able to again retain the majority of the older vote. Most of the older vote is in the form of absentee ballots. These ballots themselves are connected to controversy as the notion of corruption and incompetence has been raised. Kilpatrick's own grandfather who is deceased has been reported to have obtained and filled out an absentee ballot application. The older generation is still in control of this city. They city workers may seem to be dominated by youth but experience is obtained through repetition and the only way to adequately repeat a task is to have time to do it over and over again. One thing though we have come to learn for a fact that wisdom is not a factor of age.