I’m reading a hundred different tweets from old people, begging us to do something to save them from Covid-19 — some of these are people that I consider friends. They’re not some dehumanized evil.

The cannot afford to stay indoors and practice social isolation. They drive for Uber or they deliver for Doordash, or perhaps they work some minimum-wage fast-food job. They are still working. They cannot afford to get to and stay in safety — in a decent society, they would be there by default.

These are people who have worked all their lives, getting no further ahead, and they are getting tired and infirm — and there is no one around who can afford to take care of them, and so they must continue to work. This is an indecent society — people who have worked all their lives should get to rest in their old age, whether that is because they have accumulated enough wealth to live off of, or they receive a pension (whether provided by a firm or a state or a community) of some sort, or they simply have younger relatives who can afford to welcome their elders into their homes.

At a minimum, we should have low-impact easy jobs to keep our elders feeling productive, stimulated, and needed — child care or teaching or gardening, so on and so on. The sorts of useful jobs that old people have done in many other more “primitive” cultures. But these do not generally pay enough, or need to be done at too great a scale, in American society.

A decent — capitalist, socialist, communist, whatever— society does not abandon its elderly like this. It does not make people work until they die, wringing them of their capability to work like sponges and discarding them when they are done.

This is not just a matter of altruism. What will happen to me, when I am old?