Harris has a policy!

Why doesn't Kamala Harris spell out her policies? The legacy mass media keep loudly demanding this.

I'm talking to voters on the phones, at least the ones who don't hang up on me. The Harris voters who I'm helping to navigate Pennsylvania's mail-in ballot maze have two concerns that don't seem to arise from lack of policy plans: they want to be done with Trump and/or to ensure that women can make their own decisions about our bodies.

So you can count me among the surprised when I learned that Kamala Harris was articulating a serious effort to make possible in-home care for elders. That really is a novelty. 

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris ... proposed a major new initiative: expanding Medicare to cover the cost of long-term care at home.

Such a plan could mean the option of staying at home, rather than in a nursing facility, for the millions of seniors and people with disabilities who need help with the daily tasks of life.

It could also mean physical and financial relief ― and new opportunities for school or work outside the home ― for the millions of working-age Americans who today provide so much of that care on their own without much in the way of outside assistance.

If the proposed legislation is enacted, such a program would represent a substantial boost in federal support for caregiving and, by any measure, one of the largest one-time increases in American history. HuffPost

This could be huge for most all of us. Most old people want to stay in their homes as they age, but the way assistance has been structured has made this incredibly difficult. At present, eligibility for government assistance for home care usually requires spending down all you have to become dependent on Medicaid. Naturally most people don't want to do this. Many feel that they would be robbing their children, besides naturally wanting to stay in home surroundings.

I watched this in my own family. My mother-in-law didn't have much savings to retire on. Rent took up more and more of her budget. As her chronic illnesses worsened, she needed help -- not medical help, but help with the tasks of daily living, food shopping, some cooking. But she certainly didn't need to be in a nursing home. Yet Medicare did nothing for her. Ever ingenious, she realized that if she went into hospice care, she could get some home assistance ... so she schemed to qualify. She then survived longer in hospice care than anyone her workers had ever seen, being a tough and artful old bird. It took a special sort of person to pull this off; she should not have had to find a way to game the system.

What Harris is proposing could be life changing for elders and families. I have to ask, why aren't we hearing more about this policy proposal?

In answer, I suspect is that in-home elder care is a burden that falls more on women than on men. Women live longer and find themselves in this fix more often; daughters live with the expectation they'll take up the task of caring for family members. This is coded (and actually is) a women's issue -- perhaps we only get one per election and this year it is bodily autonomy? That's good, but we need more.

Can this get passed into law? Certainly only if enough Democratic Senators and Congressmen win to ensure majorities. And it may take a few legislative rounds for such a major expansion of the government's duty of care to become law. But this is a worthy goal.

Here's Harris making the pitch for her plan. I like the bit about how she cooked for her dying mother, searching for foods the older woman would find appetizing. That's the real stuff!

On getting out of the way

Today on Tom Dispatch, Erudite Partner offers "A Personal Meditation on Growing Old In a Catastrophic Age." She wonders are we, still healthy Boomers, "old and in the way"? She reports for herself, feeling of "shame" about retirement and also "fear of disconnection."

Yet, in this vital campaign season, she's far from disconnected. She's once again in Reno, NV, training volunteers to canvass voters for Harris-Walz, alongside the labor union UniteHERE. Those cooks and room cleaners are banging on doors for decency and democracy once again. You can join that work by signing up through Seed the Vote.

She explains:

The other fear that keeps me working with my union, joining political campaigns, and writing articles like this one is the fear of the larger threats we humans face. We live in an age of catastrophes, present or potential. These include the possible annihilation of democratic systems in this country, the potential annihilation of whole peoples (Palestinians, for example, or Sudanese), or indeed, the annihilation of our species, whether quickly in a nuclear war or more slowly through the agonizing effects of climate change.

But even in such an age, I suspect that it’s time for many of my generation to trust those coming up behind us and pass the torch. They may not be ready, but neither were most of us when someone shoved that cone of flame into our hands.

Erudite Partner also explains in this article that, unlike her, I have drawn back, that I am accepting that I'm retired from the immediate fray, just doing a little volunteer recruitment from home. After all these years during which I've made periodic forays into the center of the work of progress, this time I get to watch and cheer those who can and should struggle in a more central arena. It's a shock, but it feels right and realistic.

 New folks -- get out there and win!

The Baby Boom endures?

Kevin Munger points out: "Harris’s nomination locks in another Boomer presidency." 

 

I hadn't quite thought of it that way. As a product of the leading edge of the Boomers (b. 1947) I don't find it automatic to locate myself in the same age cohort as someone who missed the '50s and most of the '60s. But demographic wizards say all of us born between 1946 and 1964 (including Harris) are out of the same population bulge which first led to a need for new kindergartens and grade schools and now is leading to increased worry about funding Social Security.

Munger is the author of Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture. His commentary on the Harris-Trump match up is interesting. 

Despite being a Boomer, you may have noticed that she’s the young, exciting candidate.

Yes, the generational cutoff points are arbitrary, 19 is too many years to define a coherent generation. But the far more important fact is that Biden and Trump are really quite old.

The echoes of the Baby Boom structure our political, economic and cultural reality. Our country’s age pyramid is just what our country is.

It is a crucial but oddly politically inert fact that at both the mass and elite level, our country is far older than it has ever been before. ...

It’s our electoral institutions [that] cause the US to have such astronomically old leaders. The two-party system, lax campaign and especially campaign finance laws, and the primary system tilt the process heavily in favor of people with time, money and political interest — which, in our society, tends to be older people.

Combine this with the Baby Boom and you get the current situation, playing out in slow motion, a demographic wave not crashing but seeping into and drowning our politics.

... A media-theoretic aside: television has demonstrated its continued dominance of the media ecosystem. The 2024 Biden-Trump debate is — without exaggeration — one of the most important media events in modern history. ...

He goes on to delve into the history of recent elections when there was a substantial difference in ages between candidates (younger won) and the "unmet demand for younger politicians appealing to younger voters."  

We Boomers got to give way someday ... but by once again, somehow, presenting the country with the apparently young candidate in Kamala Harris, we are imprinting yet another generation of young voters with what Munger has named "Boomer Ballast." This has been very good for Democrats for decades.

Selfishness in a crisis does not serve

So I watched the debate. For a good bit of it that's more than figuratively true. Seeing that Biden appeared befuddled, I turned the sound off, to see whether Trump's phony gibberish was disorienting me. Nope -- Biden as leader didn't show up. 

I'm sympathetic to the old guy. He's been a good president, achieving far more with less broad support than most in my lifetime. He's got us as far on the climate sustainability path as a very reluctant, oblivious, nation would allow. His projects lean toward better lives and inclusion for all, with necessary attention to those who have least. Not perfect, but on the side of the good. 

I've read bushels of commentary -- what a mountain of anxiety and sometimes pure BS! I'm still prepared to work in the fall at winning the battleground state of Nevada (as I have every cycle since 2018) for the Dems and Biden, if that's where we end up.

But in my heart I'm with Bill McKibben -- environmentalist, founder of the old people's mobilizing group Third Act, and Presbyterian Sunday school teacher. Here's an abbreviated bit of his reaction to the debate. 

Give Joe some room

[With Thursday's debate} ... the tectonic plates shifted. And in ways that open up the possibility not just of decisively defeating Trumpism, but of pulling the country out of the polarized death spiral we’ve fallen into. But it’s going to take a while to play out, I think—time that we should grant Joe Biden, who’s at one of those hard, interesting, decisive points that come in the course of a life and of a nation.

... What happened of course was that Biden looked feeble. Yes, Trump lied with his usual feral energy, and yes the CNN moderators were utterly inept. But both those things were givens. What wasn’t a given was Biden’s performance. He lacked the agility and the poise to handle Trump’s onslaught, and it wasn’t close.

... An ineffective Biden would be a hundred times better (and a hundred times less worse, which might be more important) than any version of Donald Trump.

But again, that’s not enough. Politics is about changing people’s minds, channeling their intuitions, organizing their moods. Communication is the main tool for that. And Biden is no longer a consistently effective communicator. He’s got good people around him, he can and has made wise decisions, I am not worried about the operation of the Republic under his care. But clearly he can no longer count on his ability to rally Americans.

... There’s no shame in that. Most people never have that ability. Biden himself has never been a great speechifier, but across his long career he has always been able to communicate an effective in-your-corner regular-guy I’ve-got-this message. He’s been reassuring. He’s been a father figure, trending towards cool grandfather. But eventually you’re a great grandfather, and your hard-working days are behind you. Which is fine. You still have plenty to contribute, but that contribution is in the form of counsel, not leadership; it’s in the form of support, not of dominance.

He’ll be reluctant to admit it, because we all are reluctant to admit, even to ourselves, the things we lose as we age. (One of the odd secrets of aging is that you really don’t feel older from the inside). ...

... And I think Biden will get this. He’s a patriot, he’s spent his life in service, he clearly understands that the country is more important than any person. So he will steel himself to the task of watching the tape of last night’s debate, and he won’t make excuses. And then he may say ‘I’ve done my part well—I rescued America from Trump and from covid. And now I have one great duty left, which is to pass on the reins. So I’m freeing up my delegates to choose someone else.’

That’s not easy to do—save for the sad example of LBJ, no one’s ever really had to. It will take courage, and self-knowledge, and it will take time. But there is some time, thank heaven. Give him some time. It’s not that far from someone deciding that they need to leave their home and move into a retirement community; it’s an admission that one time is past and another coming.

... It’s not like we [would not] have time to adjust to someone new—our current news cycle guarantees we’d know all about a Whitmer or a whoever within days, and we wouldn’t have time to grow tired of her before November. She or someone like her would unleash the energy of the possible, at a moment when in fact we have huge possibilities. On energy, for instance: Biden has done a beautiful job of working the IRA through Congress, but the polling shows he’s never managed to make its importance sink in. He couldn’t explain its power last night, couldn’t summon people to a future that runs on the sun. That’s a crucial task, a way of giving young people hope as they face a daunting future. Not just young people—really, most Americans keep saying they’d like a fresher choice for our future. Suddenly there’s a moment when that could happen.

People keep saying ‘Biden won’t step aside, so we need to support him.’ And if he doesn’t we must.

But the very thing that makes him worth supporting—an old-fashioned commitment to something more than himself—is the thing that may convince him (and his wife, who actually loves him) to do the bold and interesting thing. To do the thing that could mark a new moment in our political life. If Biden chooses to stay in, so be it—I’ll work my heart out for him, and ungrudgingly. But even if he manages to win, we’ll still be stuck in the same poisonous paralysis we inhabit now. Someone sometime has to break us out of this stalemate, and it might as well be that right man for this moment, good old Joe Biden.

Trumpism is selfishness—that is its parts and that is its sum. With a powerful act of selflessness Biden can break the evil spell that selfishness has cast. It would be a remarkable thing for an old man to do, and a hell of a way to cap a career that began in the 1960s. Ask what you can do for your country!

Emphasis in the original.

People living on the streets are old

I'm a San Franciscan. Unhappily, I'm all too used to living near unhoused people. But this summary still could jar me.

A major study on homelessness in California, released last year by UC San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI), includes two notable findings: 48% of all unhoused single adults in the state are 50 or older and 41% of unhoused older adults became homeless for the first time after age 50.

According to the report:

• “Being single is a risk factor for homelessness.” Of the older adults surveyed, 52% were single and never married; 17% reported being married or partnered. More than a quarter were divorced or separated, and 4% were widowed.

• “More than 80% of older adults entered homelessness from housing: 46% from non-leaseholding arrangements and 35% from leaseholding arrangements. The other 19% entered homelessness from institutions, which included time in jail, prison or healthcare settings.

• Poor health is a common reality among older adults experiencing homelessness. More than two-thirds reported having at least one significant chronic health condition. About a quarter of those surveyed said they’d experienced a time when they couldn’t get healthcare or obtain medication they needed.

• While people of color are overrepresented overall within the state’s unhoused population, older Black adults are particularly overrepresented. The report notes that 31% of older adults experiencing homelessness identified as Black, compared with 6% of all Californians age 50 or older. Older adults who identified as Native American or Indigenous and multiracial were also overrepresented, the survey found.

• The majority of older adults surveyed expressed optimism that “well-timed financial support would have staved off homelessness,” the authors wrote. Many believed that a modest monthly subsidy ($300 to $500), a one-time payment ($5,000 to $10,000) or something akin to a housing voucher would have allowed them to stay in their homes.

We use folks up and spit them out.

Organized fire

The news that Jane McAlevey has entered hospice care hits hard. If you didn't have the chance to meet her, know that Jane was a stalwart of the UC Berkeley Labor Center and hundreds of labor struggles over the last four decades. She communicated how people, collectively, can find their power and fight for themselves.

I've always liked this snap of Jane caught at a board meeting of the Applied Research Center in 2000.

Her organized fire, harnessing anger and pride for people power, has made a difference to so many.

• • •

The news about Jane puts me in mind of this from the wise Kareem Abdul Jabbar:

The past few years has been a relentless stream of days in which someone I care about dies and I grieve the loss. Worse, I’m at an age where I know I will have to face many more of those days. Death. Grieve. Repeat. I am no longer surprised when it happens, the inevitability has numbed me from shock. But not from the sadness. Not from the grief.

At the same time, I realize that each death is like a customer number being called at a bakery—each number brings us closer to our own digits being announced. Then—if you’ve lived your life right—others will grieve for you. Circle of life, blah blah blah.

I’m all for inspirational quotes that embrace the challenges of life with a positive can-do attitude. I do them almost every week. But to ignore the darker aspects of living is to trivialize them and leaves us ill-equipped to deal with them. In a way, the grieving process is a way of honoring your relationships and celebrating a life that is filled with people worth grieving over.

Each day I wake prepared to grieve again. I am not afraid of it anymore. Grief and I are friendly companions skipping stones across the infinite that spreads out before me like a calm lake with grandchildren frolicking on the shore.

It's a time of life. But some people go on too soon.

Old friends

 

We went to a lovely birthday party last weekend; the happy recipient of this excellent t-shirt had just turned 70, a mere youth from my perch. But there we are.

It seems appropriate to mark this occasion with some reflections from the great Kareem Abdul Jabbar -- the GOAT basketball wizard and reflective elder:

My body is an assassin. And his main target is me. He wants to kill me, but not all at once. He’s a sadistic sniper, hitting me here, allowing me to recover, then hitting me again in a different spot. He shot me with leukemia, prostate cancer, and Afib. He’s not done. He’s waiting out there somewhere, crouching in the bushes, controlling his breathing, line up his crosshairs on a fresh part of my body.

Oh, the betrayal. My body and I used to be best buds. We chummed around everywhere together, eating great food, playing basketball, enjoying romantic relationships. Sometimes we got hurt, but we healed fast and laughed it off. Together we felt like we could do anything, achieve greatness. And we did.

Now I sometimes feel about my body like I’m caring for a gruff hobbling parent, hauling him to appointment after appointment, while he shows no gratitude. Yet, he leans all his considerable weight on me as I schlep him around all day. It’s exhausting.

Still, I love the old curmudgeon. He may trip me when I’m not looking. May make me forget a book title or where I left my glasses. May be adding a laser scope to his rifle. But sometimes he forgets his sinister mission and comes out from the bushes to hang with old friends, play with grandchildren, and comfort others. He’s not all bad.

Our evolving relationship has actually done me more good than harm. I learned how to lean on others when I was ill. That is not a small accomplishment. Each clumsy potshot he’s taken has brought me closer to my friends and family. Plus, seeing dedicated doctors and nurses doing all they could to help me nurtured my faith in humanity. Faith in humanity is an endangered emotion these days, so I’m happy whenever I experience it anew.

Maybe my body isn’t an assassin. Maybe it’s still my best buddy. It’s just that now we have a different, more mature relationship, based on shared joys and shared struggles. In his song “Old Friends,” Paul Simon wrote about two old men sitting on a park bench: “Old friends, memory brushes the same years/Silently sharing the same fears.” Me and my body are those old friends. Maybe we do share the same fears about deterioration and death, but they’re a lot less scary facing them together.

And neither of us intends, as Dylan Thomas said, to “go gentle into that good night.”

Further wisdom from Kareem:

I realize that my purpose isn’t to solve problems. That’s way too grandiose. Problems of some sort will always plague humanity. I just want to lend a hand in pushing the giant rock up the hill while also giving comfort to others who are struggling with the weight. The more we work together, the lighter the load for everyone. That’s my real purpose: to lighten the load. 

Though his body betrays him, he's aging deeply and sharing meaningfully.

2023: the year I became my age

Atlantic editor Jennifer Senior recently explored the concept of "subjective age" [gift link] -- the sense of our own age we carry about with us which often differs from our chronological age. We commonly experience ourselves as younger than we are.

... we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—“as if there’s been some sort of error” were his exact words. (High-school reunions can have this same confusing effect. You look around at your lined and thickened classmates, wondering how they could have so violently capitulated to age; then you see photographs of yourself from that same event and realize: Oh.) The gulf between how old we are and how old we believe ourselves to be can often be measured in light-years—or at least a goodly number of old-fashioned Earth ones.

She explores interestingly why this might be -- and especially why we might cling to a self consciousness rooted in mid-life. This time was (or will be for younger persons) when we "get it together" as much we ever might. At least for some of us.

I still like silly hats.

The past year has seen a change in my subjective perception of my age, a change I'm enjoying. Guess what? I'm actually 76 -- and that's just fine.

This wasn't always so. I spent much of my 50s, 60s, and early 70s pushing the envelope physically, from treks to Kilimanjaro, Nepal, and Montenegro to ultra-distance running. This was fun and sustained my unrealistic sense of my age.

In 2022, I worked with a crew of over 100 committed hotel union members canvassing for the election -- and repeatedly realized they had no idea I was 75. My age exceeded the life expectancy of the Black folks working so hard together (they clearly thought 65 was old) and astonished them if they learned it. (We had one old white guy over 80; I don't know how he was perceived.)

But this past year I've caught up with myself.

I can identify a couple of obvious markers that lead to this changed feeling:

1) people my age, including people I knew in childhood, keep dying. That's a reality that's hard to ignore.

2) my body is to some extent wearing out. I can no longer trek and run all those miles. Exertion that once built strength just leaves me tired. Oh, I keep trying for 20 miles a week lumbering along with two trekking poles, but it is not the same.

On the other hand, I seem to, happily, bring a more peaceful mind to the challenges and agonies of the world around us. That mind is no less committed to struggles for justice and compassion, but perhaps more forgiving of the long parade of human folly and joy. We can but trod along, doing our bit and loving as much as we can.

I like being 76. Onward.

A simple homily from a great

For a long time, and perhaps still, anyone listing the greats of the National Basketball Association would quickly name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Now 76, and having overcome several health challenges, he's still doing what he's done since retiring at 42: working for a better world. 

These days, Abdul-Jabbar writes a carefully constructed newsletter which is well worth your time. Here's an example of the sort of message he posts.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. – Jesus, Luke 6:31 and Matthew 7:12

This quote is often referred to as The Golden Rule because almost all religions and philosophies can be distilled into this one universal idea. To follow this is to have achieved full potential as a human being. There are hundreds of similar sayings from every religion and most philosophers throughout history, many from hundreds of years before Jesus or the Bible. (For a comprehensive list, check out The Golden Rule Project.) For example:

• “Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you.” Confucius (c. 551 – c. 479 BCE), Analects 15:23 (Confucianism)

• “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” Tripitaka Udanavarga 5:18 (Buddhism)

• “Do not do to others that which would anger you if others did it to you.” Socrates

• “Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others that which you wish for yourself.” The Prophet Muhammad Hadith (Islam)

The reason I chose to highlight the [Christian] biblical version over the other variations is that most of the others approach the concept as a warning about what not to do. But the biblical quote frames it so that we should diligently “do unto others,” meaning not just avoid harming, but intentionally going out and doing good. The Islamic admonishment— “Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others that which you wish for yourself.”—has that same vibe. One should wish for others what we would want. But that still stops short of actively doing. That little difference is what makes the biblical teaching the most challenging to follow.

So simple—yet, so hard. Sudoku for the soul. The main challenge to living by this teaching is that we can MacGyver it whenever the going gets tough. We find a sneaky workaround that allows us to ignore the rule, but still feel virtuous: “That person hurt me, therefore they don’t deserve my doing unto them.” “That person doesn’t follow the teaching so why should I follow it with them?” And so forth. We’re ingenious when it comes to tricking ourselves.

The thing is, the teaching doesn’t say “do unto some others” or “do unto deserving others.” Just others. That’s the point. By following the teaching, two practical things happen: First, you are overcoming your own biases and emotional roadblocks to become a better person. This will lift a lot of burdens from you and make you happier. Second, through your selfless example, you are helping to create a world in which everyone follows this teaching. You’re creating “others'“ who will also do unto you.

Sadly, this is the most popular and least followed teaching. Part of the reason is that many people can’t distinguish between doing unto others and imposing on others. Doing unto others is to treat others as they wish to be treated. However, some prefer to impose their beliefs and value systems on others instead. Which would be the opposite of the teaching. The goal of these people is not to do good, but to feel good about themselves.

I think of this quote whenever my pettiness, ego, stubbornness, or biases nudge me to be rude, dismissive, or even cruel. To deliberately inflict emotional pain on another is shameful. It is a transgression we have all committed, but to pull out a Richard Wilbur quote I recently wrote about, “The past is never past redeeming.”

We can do better unto ourselves. We must do better unto others.

Yes, Abdul-Jabbar also has plenty of opinions about how the powerful act in the world, always tending to highlight both the need for more justice and striving for more peace. He's still a great among us.

Old man Ike and old man Joe

Widespread anxiety about Joe Biden's age as he approaches his re-election campaign has made me realize that I belong to a dwindling cohort of Americans who can remember living with concerns about the health of an elderly president. 

I was just a precocious twit in the late 1950s, but I remember knowing that my mother, who was an Eisenhower admirer, worried frequently about President Ike's health. She was scared of a belligerent Soviet Union and wanted the General's steady hand in charge. She greatly admired his leadership of the coalition of Allied armies that defeated Nazi Germany. She didn't ask a lot of questions that my generation might have; those came later. (Yes, she was also doubtful about Veep Richard Nixon, though probably not as much as she should have been.)

Post-presidential portrait by Richard Avedon

In fact, there was plenty to worry about in Eisenhower's health records. There was anxiety about his age at re-election in 1956; he was 66 which seemed a lot older then than it does today. He began the practice of releasing candidate health records to the public -- though he wasn't entirely candid, not revealing the severity of his infirmities.

During 1955, he suffered a heart attack from which he fairly quickly recovered; after re-election, the compromise to his heart led to a transient stroke in 1957. The National Aphasia Society, rather proudly, reports how Eisenhower dealt with his mild disability during the rest of his term.

While speaking to his secretary on November 25, 1957, Eisenhower found he could not complete his sentences. When examined he had neither motor nor sensory impairment. The diagnosis was occlusion of the left middle cerebral artery. Eisenhower, who was 67 years old and had three years remaining in his second term of office, was already taking coumadin at this time.

... After remaining in seclusion for 3 days, Eisenhower returned to work, his speech not yet back to normal. To some, the press coverage of his difficulties in this period seemed “unnecessarily savage and sadistic,” since some reporters seemed to be counting the number of goofs Eisenhower made during a press conference. But unlike the 1955 heart attack and the 1956 abdominal operation, the 1957 stroke occurred at a time when important presidential meetings were scheduled.

... His reactions to his speech difficulties were variable. Among friends he would occasionally laugh off his mistakes, but on one occasion, when he was having difficulty speaking, he said with effort “There’s nothing the matter with me, I’m perfectly all right.”

Most people knew there was something going on with Ike, but did not, I think, ever conclude that he was "too old" for his job. His approval rating was often as high as 70 percent. 

• • •

Those were different times. We tend to think they were less partisan and vicious, and maybe they were, but the country was riven by McCarthyism, a permanent hunt for "Red traitors." The Civil Rights struggle was taking center stage. Still, a president wasn't expected and forced to be nearly as forthcoming about his physical condition as he would be today. For better or worse, a mildly impaired president could count on his administration to stay its course (especially in a second term), knowing he only had to be on top of the biggest stuff. 

Ike kept us out of the shooting war in Vietnam -- he seemed to know better -- but he didn't check the war inertia that dumped his successors into the fire. He did the bare minimum in response to the Black freedom struggle then emerging.

• • •

I am prepared to believe that Joe Biden, older but far more healthy than Eisenhower, can lead another administration. He's built a sound, competent, even creative administration in the wake of the Trump mess. In these days, he'll be surrounded by noisy detractors looking for weaknesses. But also, Biden seems to have acquired more wisdom and stature as he has aged. He's used his long-acquired command of the governing process to get more wins for health care and climate sustainability than seemed possible. He's also often culturally clueless about the world in which people under 35 live; so am I.

And when it comes down to it -- in 2024, he'll be running against Donald Trump, who is no spring chicken himself and whose ideas about women and people color seem to derive from another century. No contest there. We need a president, not a petulant, racist, old man who is a wanna-be dictator.

Gerontocracy and the role of elders

Sarah Chayes -- formerly of NPR, Afghanistan NGOs, and civilian advisor to U.S. military proconsuls -- has used the occasion of Senator Diane Feinstein's death to reflect on our failure to offer a right role to our elders.

Too often, old people of great accomplishment like Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Diane Feinstein cannot envision how they might exist in their last years in a society they've helped to shape. So they just stumble on through infirmity long beyond their time, ensuring they cannot come to a dignified exit. This is not their fault; we do not offer a socially recognized alternative.

... we have deprived ourselves of a crucial social role. We have deprived ourselves of the human capacity to hold our sacred collective knowledge and bring it forth when needed. And we have deprived our elders of the opportunity to fill that role, and to be honored for the unique gifts they have to offer, instead of sniggered at for their physical frailties and their stubborn self-delusion.

Riffing on a fable by the Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger, Chayes concludes:

In pre-modern cultures, and in some places down to the more recent past, there was a recognized stage of life that we have abolished: elderhood. ... It is the role of councillor, the person situated a bit off to the edge of the ruckus of the society, who is sought out for the different or deeper insight they can offer.

... among elders, the investment of ego in the details of the outcome is releasing. The wisdom is on offer, no constraints. No gnashing of teeth in frustration at being unable to make this or that thing happen.

Meanwhile, the full-fledged adults who should be rising to leadership roles [we leave] dancing attendance. Or, disgusted, they turn away from public affair

This is no way to run a society.

And this, to me, is the real problem with our gerontocracy.

Old people, people over 65, are now 1 in 6 or 17 percent of Americans. There are some 55 million of us.

By 2060, there will be 95 million elders. (No, I don't expect to be around to see this.)

The society would be wise to try to figure out how to both 1) use what we learned in a manner and in roles that we can appreciate; and 2) get us gracefully out of the way so generational transition can take place. 

Speaker Emerita Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi has set an extremely rare and extremely wise example by smoothly passing on leadership.

#StandUpUAW: it runs in the family

The daughter of one of the 1937 Flint GM sit-down strikers walked the picket line in solidarity with workers at GM CCA in Swartz Creek, MI, Friday. 86 years after the sit down strike, UAW members are standing up! @UAW

The union makes us strong. Keeping on keeping on.

In which Erudite Partner returns to the inescapable ...

... after a 40 year hiatus. 

Stumbling Towards Old Age ... And Looking for Someone to Lean On
It turns out that we — the people of this country — are all on our own. ... But even as I grieve for capacities lost and departing, I’m still not ready to come face to face with the only true alternative to aging: not some tech bro’s wet dream of eternal life, but the reality of death. I’m opposed to dying and, had the universe consulted me, I’d have left mortality out of its design completely. 

... Aging really is a roulette game.

Need the inevitable be quite so lonely? Could we, collectively, do better by each other?

My generation is often part of the problem

Paul Krugman [gift article] comes up with some data that surprised me. He explains that Miami, if anything, has less affordable housing costs than New York City. As in New York City and here in San Francisco, the high cost reflects inadequate supply. Folks with money bid up the price of what exists in a location they find desirable.

He also shares a good deal additional about the Florida economy that I'd not been aware of, at least front of mind.

Retirees have been moving to Florida for the warm winters for a long time, ever since Groucho Marx told potential buyers: “You can get any kind of a home you want. You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stucco!” But there are a lot more potential retired migrants now than in the past: between 2010 and 2020 the overall U.S. population grew only 7.4 percent, but the population 65 and older grew 38.6 percent. And since retirees spend money on local services, the influx of seniors creates jobs for younger adults as well.

... the influx of retirees does help explain why Florida’s population is still growing fast even though its biggest metropolitan area has become increasingly unaffordable.

Ron DeSantis better not attack Medicare. 

But also, the growing distortion of the state's age profile might, unhappily, explain why the ambitious governor thinks the way to go is to attack "woke."  His voters are the semi-affluent, white, retirees, not the Black and brown, younger, working class in the state. As the age profile of the state tilts more and more toward older Boomers, maybe it's fine to hobble education for young Floridians? 

This sort of thing doesn't end well.

Patricia (Pat) Sousa: 1929 – 2022

Way back in 2010, writing at age 80, my friend Pat Sousa wrote an autobiographic account of her long working-class, lesbian life -- and I published a sort of dialogue between her times and mine in a Gay and Gray essay at Ronni Bennett's Time Goes By.

Pat was nowhere near done with life; she lived to be 93, leaving us last October. Today we are attending a memorial in her honor. 

And so I want to bring forward again her own account of her remarkable life. She was brave, inquisitive, and patient with younger friends scurrying about. Here's Pat's life, in her own words.

"I was born at home, with the help of a midwife, near Hayward, California, on July 12, 1929. That's exactly what my birth certificate says, "near Hayward...”

“I would call the neighborhood 'city lots' but in those days, that meant quarter acre lots...and everyone had vegetable gardens, chickens, rabbits...everyone. It was the depression!

“...We were low class. Now I guess the word is working class. Everyone was poor, but everyone got by. Like many others in the neighborhood, my mother and her sisters worked at Hunt Brothers Cannery, which was only a block away.”

”I never did very well at school. I had a very hard time with learning to read. Looking back, I wonder if I had some hearing loss even then, or some kind of learning disability. Who knows? But I really struggled. By the time I was 16, just starting 10th grade, I was impatient to go to work, earn a living, have some money in my pocket. So that's what I did, I quit school and went to work in the canneries. Within a year, I'd settled into line work at Owens Illinois glass factory, although I'd had to fudge my age a little in order to get hired...

“No one would believe me if I told you how shy and quiet and serious I was when I started at Owens. I was a 'mind your own business' kind of person. It took quite a few years before I began to speak out and express myself...it was a slow process. But gradually I got more confident. I became active in the union, I was a shop steward, and even union president. Part of that 'growing up' included going back and earning my GED. Owens encouraged people to be educated and was very supportive about that.”

”Owens was a community in itself - there were almost 2000 employees altogether and we did shift work, one week on days, one week on swing, then a week working graveyard; that's how they did it in those days, and that was my life for the next 30+ years. Owens had a women's softball team, and Owens had women like me! I made friends, buddies; I didn't feel so alone...

“In those early days at Owens my hair was short - they all knew...but the word "lesbian" was never used. You were 'butch.'

“I remember reading The Well of Loneliness...I thought, 'wow, they write books about it!' There was so much I was in the dark about...

“My social life centered at Owens. There were gay bars that you could go to, Last Chance, Pearl's, but I was cautious, not wanting to get caught in a pick-up, a raid, which were frequent particularly in the 40s and 50s. Owens had a policy that what you did away from work was a reflection on your work...so if you weren't 'a good citizen' you could get yourself fired.

“My buddies and I were attracted to straight women. That's all that we knew; that's just how it was. We always hoped they would stay with us 'forever,' and some were lucky; my buddy Mick and her partner Erla were together about 30 years until Erla's death. Most of us, though, would end up with broken hearts. We all did the best we could.”

”I knew from my experiences at Owens that there was no reason a woman could not be a crew leader or even a manager. We were training the men, and they got the promotions. There had never been a woman in management at the Owens Oakland plant.

“In the early 70s, with Equal Opportunity, I filed a grievance to become crew leader. There was a lot of haggling back and forth, management would come up with reasons against, and I'd respond; it kept on and on and finally they said, 'OK, Pat, we give up,' and I became the first woman crew leader at that Oakland plant.

“A few years later I was finally promoted to management - no more shift work, no more hourly pay! My final position at Owens before retirement in 1984, was as a 'service engineer,' visiting our customers' facilities, mostly at that time wineries all over northern California, and trouble shooting whatever problems they might be having with the manufacture of our various commercial containers.”

... “And every day I give thanks to the Creator; I give thanks for everything. I walk in my garden and every little growing thing is a miracle. There has to be something larger than a man or a woman, larger than 'God' to create all this! It's a shame we don't spend more time in awe about what's all around us, and appreciating it rather than destroying it. So I give thanks for life, for the life of every one and everything around me.”

Pat is survived by hundreds of friends, including special friend, Laura Tow.

From the pest house ...

First off, I should say that Covid is not being very miserable. Some fevers, a little woozy, but mostly necessary isolation even from the EP who has advanced to a negative test. I yearn to follow.

Click to enlarge.

After some mild bureaucratic obstacle jumping, my Kaiser doctors prescribed paxlovid -- and I just want to share that the drug's packaging is a revelation. Pictured above.

Why don't most drugs come with packaging which embodies the instructions as this does? You just do what it says ... it is even color coded.

I raise that because, right before I caught the Covid, I'd been taking a week long course of an antibiotic as a preventive precaution when having a tooth extracted. You know -- I was prescribed a neat little bottle of 21 pills to be ingested three times a day. And within a couple of days, pre-Covid, I found myself confused: had I really taken the morning dose? Or the midday one? I just did the best I could.

I know that there are specialized pill boxes for this sort of thing. Or I could have created a card to check off the doses as I took them. But wouldn't it be better if the packaging the drug comes in did the trick, easing compliance? 

In particular, Medicare should require drug companies to package all drugs we old timers might take in this instructive way. Just a thought.

For the record: Social Security on trial again

Since we are condemned by Republican crazies to spend another season defending Social Security from tinkering that could devastate people who depend on the program, a little more awareness of how the program actually works might be helpful.

By way of Josh Marshall:

Social Security and Medicare are funded (almost entirely) by a payroll tax of approximately 15% on wage and salary income up to a statutory cap, which currently stands at $160,200. That is tax is split between the employer and the employee. That funds the two programs. A couple generations ago, Congress increased the tax to build up a surplus to pay for the benefits of the baby boom generation. That’s the “trust fund”. Social Security “lent” that extra money to the rest of the federal government, i.e., it purchased government bonds. Eventually that Trust Fund will run out of bonds to cash in. The current estimate is that that will happen in the mid-2030s. This is when Social Security supposedly become ‘insolvent”.

But that’s a meaningless term. The federal government has to pay its promised benefits and if they can’t all be paid by out of payroll taxes the remainder can and will be paid out of general revenues. This was actually the assumption about what would eventually happen back when the program was founded almost a century ago. ...

This doesn’t mean it’s a non-issue. It means there will be funding gap and that’s just a budgetary issue to be resolved. It’s not ‘insolvent’. That’s just scare talk. Now, how can the funding gap be resolved? You could just pay the remainder out of general revenue (the general tax base of income, corporate, capital gains and other taxes that are not tied to any specific program). ...

The aging of the baby boom generation does stress the system; when we arrived in the 1950s needing more kindergartens, our sheer numbers stressed the public school system too. This is a repeat of a phenomenon that our numbers have repeatedly triggered over the decades. And any sane politician who acts surprised is lying.

Marshall goes on to delve into the weeds a bit (and his take is interesting), but those of us who need the Social Security we worked for can stay focused on the main point rather than the details.

The money exists to pay what Americans earned in our working years. If the government needs money, the answer is get it from people who have it, not to nickel and dime people who don't. Raise taxes on rich people and corporations -- that's where the money is.

Old people work, most everywhere

A long article in the New York Times this morning made it seem as the fact of old people working well into their 70s and beyond was a phenomenon of some East Asian cultures -- though one likely to be replicated in other developed societies as birth rates fell. Around the world, birth rates are falling fast, especially when women have more control over our bodies, resulting in less people of what has been considered prime working age.

And far too many old people don't have much of a social safety net to fall back on in many countries.

But please -- I can look out my front woman most days and see old people -- apparently immigrants, though I can't testify -- collecting bottles and cans to sell for recycling. Are they feeding themselves or doing their bit in families in which everyone of every age works? I don't know, though I like to guess the latter.

The notion that there is some society where most people are guaranteed a comfortable old age is a dream. Those of us who get to have one are damn lucky.

"Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste ...."

The lament in the title is Shakespeare's characterization of old age in his play As You Like It. 

It's what immediately came to mind when, during dinner on Saturday, a fully formed crown popped out of my mouth. It was a compact little item.

So today I hied myself to my wonderful dentist. Turns out, the crown was attached to an implant post whose adhesive had gotten tired and given up.

 

He glued the crown back on its post and it should be good for 15 or so more years. 

This time, the aging was in my replacement hardware, not my original equipment. A comforting discovery.

Back to what I meant to do on this day ...

The virus, precautions, and our biases

The current, and most likely continuing, risk profile of coronavirus infections is an invitation to ageism. And since ageism is an unspoken reality of our lives, it's influence cannot be discounted as we learn to live with the virus.

According to S. Matthew Liao, a professor of bioethics, philosophy and public health at New York University: 

“There’s a bit of ageism, so to speak, attached to it,” he said, adding, “People, even if they are older, they still have as much claim to live as me.”

The ageism in our understanding of the coronavirus isn't just prejudice, though both how we understand evidence and how we respond to risks will necessarily reflect out prejudices. The virus is more deadly to us old folks.

Unlike flu, which impacts both the very young and the very old, the coronavirus appears to put mostly older people at higher risk of severe disease and death. The proportion of deaths among those 65 or older has fluctuated from eight out of 10 in the first few months of the pandemic, to a low of 6 out of 10 when the delta wave struck in the summer of 2021, to a high of 9 out of 10 today.

Last month, people 85 and older represented 41.4 percent of deaths, those 75 to 84 were 30 percent of deaths, and those 65 to 74 were 17.5 percent of deaths, according to a Post analysis. All told, the 65-plus age group accounted for nearly 90 percent of covid deaths in the United States despite being only 16 percent of the population.

The only individual solution is to get fully vaxxed, take precautions that make us comfortable, and stay current with the best information we can find. And it doesn't hurt to advocate and agitate for stronger efforts to protect vulnerable old people who may not have the choices the more privileged among us enjoy.

• • • 

I write this coming off a season of serving as the "COVID officer" to a campaign involving nearly one hundred canvassers. Only one of these people contracted the coronavirus while working with each other every day, and that on the day after the election. We were determined to keep the crew as safe as possible -- for the well-being of individuals, of course, but also because an outbreak could have derailed our program.

UniteHERE can be proud that it chose to do what needed to be done to keep us COVID-free. All of us were required to be vaccinated and boosted. We wore masks indoors, though not religiously. Moreover, material safety precautions included housing everyone in separate units (no roommates on this campaign!) and renting cars for each driver, both expensive expedients which might not have been implemented with no pandemic. 

Being the COVID officer meant receiving the electronic forms everyone had to fill out each day which sought to alert folks if they had any suspicious symptoms. I spent a lot of time talking with canvassers who were plagued by allergic snuffles and providing antigen tests if they wanted them. Also providing fever thermometers.

Despite the precautions, I still think we got lucky. There's still a pandemic going on.

And we weren't all young. We had a canvasser who is 82 ...