With the kind permission of the Commentary Page editor, Chad Cain, I am retracting my A Sideways Glance column of May 1. Due to my labeling error, I accidentally submitted my notes for the column instead of the actual column. I am indebted to Chad for his courageous attempt to transform what looked like a column in need of repair into the column that appeared.

The differences between the intended versus the published column are too great for me to claim authorship. Chad and I have worked out what we hope is a failsafe procedure to be sure a repetition does not occur. I again thank Chad for all his help with this matter.

I could segue into this column by claiming I suffered a senior moment, but that would undermine my theme. Instead, I begin with the frequent complaints about the Democratic primary choice being between two old white guys, and how the general election choice will be between two old white guys. Some complaints stem from desires for a woman or person of color or both. I get that.

But expressing such desires doesn’t require “old.” “Old” struck home because, in my 80s, with gray hair and gray beard, and having just retired, I imagine that someday, in the distant future, I could possibly be old. People might reject old me if I ran for president. They might line up, of course six feet apart, to mock me. (Obviously this feeble attempt at humor, based on feigned age denial, rests on a tacit assumption of senior, age-based self-loathing that for many seniors is not altogether false.)

So, what underlies rejection of age? Some of it may result from general cultural bias against seniors. This manifests in many ways, among the worst of which are the kinds of abuse recounted by Olympia Injury Lawyers. Seniors in some senior living facilities endure “insults, name calling or profanities, yelling and screaming, mocking and criticizing, threats of harming the resident or his or her family, undermining or trivializing concerns or interests and belittling, excluding in activities or ignoring, or (pre-COVID) preventing the resident from seeing their visitors.”

Such bias is likely to also be present in politics, but in a different form. We have already seen how, for some, in the face of COVID-19, it is apparently a reasonable trade for more seniors to die if we can improve the economy. It would not be surprising to see such age bigotry in campaign politics.

The complaints about seniors as candidates seem to be twofold. First, it is claimed that the old are out of touch, not so subtly implying that they stumble through some private foggy muddle from the past, emerge to express their contempt for every sort of change, stomp on anything electronic, and then return to the fog. It used to be that “you can’t trust anyone over 30.” Now it might be “Anyone over 60 is Alz-hammered.”

Second, the old are so frail you must be careful how loudly you speak lest you fracture a femur. They are in such cognitive decline that every few moments they spit out IQ points between their loose front teeth. They are liable to die at any moment and are just waiting for you to look away so they can die on you.

Where does this twaddle come from? Here are two conjectures. For those for whom lifelong learning is oxymoronic, who have not managed to continue to learn much and become noticeably different than they were, being older does not imply acquiring experience, being wiser, becoming a different person, growing. From that perspective aging is just increasingly becoming a physically and mentally less competent version of who you have been in adulthood.

And then there is the unconscious dehumanization due to fear of death. Lurking beneath awareness, it goes: oldsters are approaching death; I don’t want to approach death; I need to be different from them so I won’t approach death; they better be different from me; not really people; some lesser form; it is not only OK to mock them, insult them, degrade them, it is necessary so I can regard them as less than I am, and consequently less deserving to remain alive; a just world or loving God will take care of that, and I’ll be saved because I am different from them.

Dehumanization comes in many colors. Do people imagine that “Honor thy Father and thy Mother” only applies to immediate biological ancestors? They are all thine.

Richard S. Bogartz is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.