By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Once upon a time ever-increasing longevity was the mark of a successful advanced industrial society. Now, according to the latest manifestation of conventional wisdom, it’s the bane. Countries are aging—and not gracefully, it’s said. You can have too much of a good thing, including old people, it seems.
Mass (Media) Hysteria
There's been a blizzard of demographic scare-mongering: I can’t call it mass hysteria, exactly, because it occurs in elite publications, too. Alarmist copy cat articles are popping up everywhere. Here are some which have appeared in the last few weeks:
“The Old World,” in the New York Times Magazine for October 17, 2010
“The Graying of the Planet” in Foreign Policy for November 2010.
“The Demographic Future” in Foreign Affairs for November-December 2010..
And the pictures! Especially the one that's becomethe heart-tugging cliché: a row of very old people hunched on a bench, apparently staring at nothing. I look at the pictures and muse, “Why aren’t they doing something? If they can walk to the park, surely they can be usefully engaged. They can absorb themselves in something interesting.”
They could, probably, unless they’ve been convinced of their uselessness. According to current conventional wisdom, people over 65 are hopeless deadwood. They're become human shells with nothing but dying on the agenda, and people, whether ghetto kids or octogenarians, tend to perform to expectations, high or low.
Branding the Old
Actually, huge numbers of officially old and very old people are performing useful tasks, well paid, ill paid and unpaid. With a little encouragement, others could join them. More about that later. Let’s stray first into the matter of “branding” old age. Let’s see how images have evolved
A long time ago age was synonymous with wisdom. Who but the elders had enough memory and experience to guide the tribe? Then the alphabet arrived. And writing. And books. Today the human memory itself is pretty much passé. We have enormous libraries. We have giga-plus bytes of computer memory. We also have the youth culture and the senior moment, which stereotypes the not-so-young brain as an unreliable filing and retrieval system. Misplace the car keys? Stumble over a name? Time to hand over the power, the status, the salary to impatient and ambitious younger folk. Time to enter the allegedly golden years of leisure, which is to say, to be warehoused first in segregated retirement communities and ultimately to be stuffed into poorly-staffed old age homes. Either way: out of sight, out of mind.
Remember when women were “put on a pedestal” to keep them from noticing their actual second-class citizenship? The equivalent for the elderly was the invention of "senior citizen" status for those granted the privilege of enjoying some well-earned "golden" years of palm-shaded golf and responsibility free grand parenthood. The image was enticing, alluring, hard to resist: smiling white-haired couples (love is eternal) framed by an attractive background. The image was soothing to the displaced and soothing to the displacers, although it was really only a glitzier version of the marooned-on-a-bench life.
Tossing Mama from the Train
Unfortunately, the house by the golf course isn’t looking so possible anymore. The days of the defined pension are just about over, increasingly replaced by defined contributions and unpredictable payback. To translate: you give; we get, take our cut and promise nothing in the way of returns or protection of capital. What a scam! The financial "advisor" is protected from market risk, but the retiree isn't.
Polls say that the Republicans won back the House of Representatives in 2010 by detaching "Seniors" from the great Obama wave of 2008. The lever, evidently, was the brilliant but false "death panel" scare that, duplicitous as it was, fed into a deep and not entirely unjustified fear of a too close final solution.
Creating a War between Generations
For long decades, American society has had no use for older Americans, who are placed in deadly competition with younger generations for jobs. Pushed out by bad times or systematically aged out in better times, they're driven from good jobs to make room for younger cheaper labor. Even if they're skilled, energetic and just barely over 50, older Americans find it impossible to be hired elsewhere at a decent wage or salary. And if they're skilled, smart, energetic and over 65, well! if that isn't oxymoronic, the entire socio-economic system will have to change.
As maybe it should. Shorter work hours and a more rounded life for everyone. Time to be a parent. Time to be a citizen. Time to get in some good exercise which leads to better health which leads to lower health care costs. Maybe a lower wage for a longer career. Maybe less distance between top and bottom re income. All this might well be part of a profound national conversation in which the elderly, the middle aged and the young all participate as voters and members of a shared society.
Unacknowledged Gifts
Preparation for the conversation should include some often-neglected facts. Millions of Americans faced with compulsory retirement have found ways to continue to contribute to society, which shouldn’t surprise the 50% of U.S. Senators who are 65 or older. Some of these not young people have been appointed to very high positions in the public and private sectors and many of them are very well paid. Meanwhile, self-employed professionals often work well into their seventies or beyond, receiving the same fees that applied when they were younger. Professors continue to teach and publish, and politicians go on forever. Of those who have formally retired, many volunteer their services—in schools, in museums, in libraries and rec centers, running non-profits, overseeing elections and performing other civic functions, starting new businesses, teaching in community colleges and life-long learning institutes, and so on. In short, those stereotypes of old age as gilded or impovrished uselessness are far too simplistic.
To a very large extent, it turns out, these much-despised older Americans are keeping the country going—and they do so for years on end, living on increasingly begrudged pensions and social security payments (or rapidly depleting savings), which means that their so-called “entitlements” should be considered more as well-earned current income. U.S. Treasury statistics should reflect this—and more. Since, in many if not most cases, that retirement income is far less than those volunteers would have received as full time unretired workers, these aging volunteers are saving public institutions a good deal of money. That, too, should be reflected in national statistics: the value added of unpaid or underpaid work by these alleged drags on the economy. Though people ought to be valued as people, that’s not happening with the elderly, so their billions of dollars of donated time might add up to a sum large enough to take the curse off their habit of outliving their welcome.
The Decent Society
Whoops! Let’s not forget to monetarize the uncompensated hours contributed by grandparents who babysit. On the other hand, no mother (or father) earns Social Security benefits for taking care of children in this society either. Either child care isn’t important work in America—or maybe it’s so important we shrink from putting a monetary value on it.
Yet, if this so, how can we reduce care for the sick and elderly to a debate over what the begrudged allowable cost should be?
That’s the bargain in a decent human society. Parents take care of children. Children take care of parents. Anything else and people are reduced to economic inputs: to be worked as hard as possible for as long as possible as cheaply as possible, then discarded as soon as possible. In fact, too many recent discussions of demographic change are cast in terms of a zero sum game, a war between generations. The old are seen to be stealing something from the young—time, money, attention. If that’s the case, why don’t we say that babies steal their parents youth and good times?
Perhaps we need to redefine the good life in America. We need that national conversation.
Seeking Wisdom
And who should be involved in this conversation? Surely, people of all ages should be involved, which means retirees, including those in nursing homes whose mental facilities are intact. Too often, as I read the proliferation of articles on the cost of aging, I have the impression that those who are about to be ground up in some triage-based disposal system have not been consulted. This, perhaps, is why elderly Americans' very real contributions to society and the economy are generally overlooked. Senior citizens do vote—and most of them aren’t lost in second childhood or lacking in a vision for the general welfare. They aren't problems. They're people, and they need to join the conversation. If they're brought in, with respect and affection, it might even be discovered that wisdom does indeed come with age.