Elderly 'Fear Ageism More Than Crime' | CARDI : Centre for Ageing Research and Development in Ireland

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Older people are more worried about ageism and discrimination than they are of being the victim of crime, a new study shows.

Research among a group of people aged between 60 and 90 showed they felt the older generation were patronised or seen as a “burden” on society.

They also expressed a strong desire to remain active by working or volunteering, the report from thinktank Demos and Brunel University said.

One pensioner said: “I am sick of the portrayal of my age group by government reports and news.”

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TIME GOES BY | The War on Elders (and Everybody Else) – Part 1 of ?

by Ronni Bennett

It's been an exhausting few weeks: the earthquake in Japan, a new U.S. military venture in Libya, the ongoing demonstrations and fighting in almost every middle eastern country, the ominous silence from Israel, the crucial protests in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana and several other states and the stepped-up budget attacks from government and corporate elites on Social Security and Medicare. Have I left out anything big?

President Obama has decamped to Latin America and Congress is in recess so maybe they can't do too much damage for awhile. It's a good time to step back and survey the big picture.

Since its inception about eight years ago, this blog has been concerned with the lives of elder issues large and small. I try to have some fun with it while lobbying for better treatment of old people, passing on practical information, addressing the difficult issues of illness and mortality and above all, adhering to Time Goes By's bedrock principle: contrary to what western culture generally tells us, there is nothing wrong with being old.

When, in these pages, I have indulged my second passion – politics – I have sometimes felt guilty about straying from the blog's purpose. Now I have come to see that in our politics, everyone of every age is at risk.

We are not supposed to say so (“all men are created equal” and blah, blah, blah) but I am sure you have noticed that there is a class war going on in the United States. Actually, it is global.

Here, it started the moment the New Deal was in place. That era's oligarchy had lost their battle against President Roosevelt's progressive legislation, but by steady increments since then, they have just about won the war now.

Over the years, the elites have used many tactics and strategies to steal all the wealth of the nation. One is the classic, divide and conquer. Let's look at that as it is applied to a crucial elder issue: Social Security.

I noticed it for the umpteenth time yesterday in an Op-Ed in The New York Times by a 24-year-old complaining about the lack of jobs and opportunity for his age group of recent graduates [emphasis is mine]:

”I fear that the young will bear the brunt of the pain:” he wrote, “taxes on workers will be raised and spending on education will be cut while mortgage subsidies and entitlements for the elderly are untouchable.

You and I know, of course, that “untouchable” no longer holds, but so deeply held is this belief among the young (old people benefit to the detriment of youth) that in the context of the young man's entire essay, his elder smackdown hardly stands out.

Why do the young believe this? Because it has been an argument repeated by the right for several decades in their ongoing offensive against Social Security and Medicare – an unrelenting propaganda machine pounding out the notion of “greedy geezers.”

That doesn't absolve a 24-year-old from doing his homework to find out how Social Security actually works but in his defense, colleges have dumbed down their courses for the past two generations and grade inflation has been flagrant for as long. So we cannot expect much critical thinking from our expensively “educated” youth.

The result, however, is an army of young people out to cut grandma's and grandpa's “entitlements” at the behest of an obscenely wealthy elite that is no more interested in the well-being of the young than they are in the current crop of “greedy geezers.”

What the young Op-Ed writer and his cohorts do not realize is that in blaming elders (instead of the wealthy elite) for their economic predicament, they deeply endanger their own futures.

How can it be otherwise? Salaries have been stagnant for more than a decade and there is no reason to believe that will change. Private pensions have been disappearing for even longer.

Any 401(k)s and IRAs that have recovered their value from the 2008 crash will be decimated again in the next crashes – certain to happen once or twice or more again over the next 40 years until the time that young man is ready to retire.

And who is to say he can even contribute to those programs. With low, flat salaries, huge college loans to repay, children to educate at astronomical tuitions, food and energy prices that are sure to rise dramatically in coming years, not to mention the cost of health care that unless we enact Medicare for All (doubtful), will be – already is - beyond the financial reach of most people.

So cuts or elimination of our “entitlements,” which many young people are convinced are necessary, will – if successful - doom their generations to an even more impoverished old age than so many of our own live with now.

The war on elders is also a war on youth - on everybody. More about all this tomorrow.

Book Review Of Never Say Die: The Myth And Marketing Of The New Old Age By Susan Jacoby | The New Republic

by Sherwin B. Nuland

One evening a few months before my eightieth birthday, I found myself addressing an audience of approximately a hundred men and women on a topic to which I have devoted considerable study during the past decade or so. My subject was the process of aging, and the ways in which current gerontological research is teaching us to deal with it. It is hardly remarkable that such a theme would engage a group whose average number of years on this earth appeared to be approximately sixty-five, especially when the speaker is a rising octogenarian known to have written abundantly about such matters.

During the course of my talk, I focused—as does much of the recent scientific, clinical, and general literature—on the optimistic. I stressed the role of determination and conscious effort in combating certain of the ravages that nature inflicts on those of us in the latter decades of life. I spoke of the importance of physical exercise, the creativity that comes with continued intellectual exploration, the critical importance of a personal sense of closeness to family and the surrounding community. Such essential patterns of living are easily explained, and they were more or less familiar to the upper-middle-class audience of friends and benefactors of the university medical center to which I had been invited.

But I also described newer and more abstruse matters, such as our present understanding of the brain’s plasticity, which allows it to change and even to improve not only its ability to function but also its actual microscopic structure, and to do so regardless of chronological age. Even more remarkable, I pointed out, was the laboratory identification of protein substances produced during the exercise of mind and muscle, such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (or BDNF), which acts to protect neural connections and to enlarge their number and strength while increasing blood supply to the cortex and encouraging the conversion of adult stem cells into cortical nerve cells. The message I delivered was this: the key to continuing productivity is continuing productivity. It is, as the late Ann Landers famously said about a particularly intimate problem of aging, “Use it or lose it.”

Not unexpectedly, following the delivery of such a buoyant message to such an audience, the applause was enthusiastic. But then a hand shot up, whose owner was a red-faced, chokingly angry man in the first row who appeared to be about sixty years old and to have deliberately disregarded the instructions on the event’s invitation that gentlemen wear business attire. Windbreaker askew, he was already halfway out of his seat and still impatiently rising before I was able to acknowledge him. I cannot recall the exact outpouring of words that he more spewed than spoke, but they were very much like the following, if a bit less organized: “What you’re saying is all very well, but don’t you realize that it applies only to men and women of means and education? The vast majority of the elderly don’t know about these things, and couldn’t afford them in any event. They often live alone and friendless or in some publicly subsidized care facility. Your ideas are suitable only for the more favored of older people. Society neglects everyone else and doesn’t care about them. Maybe you don’t, either.”
.....
All of this is by way of introducing Susan Jacoby’s disturbing and important book. Her focus is not at all on the advances that gerontological research has made in improving the health, happiness, and sometimes the longevity of much of our older population. She prefers to look into “the uncharted perils that lurk in the region of old age” and the self-delusion of “the expectation that things are going to turn out well if we only conduct ourselves well.” The notion that many of the elderly can postpone or even prevent much of the physical and mental deterioration associated with an increasing life span is, by Jacoby’s lights, the result of “myth and marketing.”

Never Say Die will stir up controversy, but it will also draw attention to social issues often ignored in our enthusiastic promotion of the health-sustaining values and behaviors in which we have placed so much faith in recent years. The book is in this way an important corrective to those of us who are so taken with the realization that conscious will and a determined approach are valuable resources that we forget the unpalatable fact that we live in a multi-tiered society in which the best will in the world, and the most determination, are limited by the reality of the actual circumstances of life.

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TIME GOES BY | When Does Old Age Begin?

by Ronni Bennett

Last week, on a post titled, A Day in an Elder's Life, reader Flora Davis posted this comment:

“You know, I was shocked to hear that you're 69. I'm 76, and to me 69 seems like a kid. I'm still waiting to feel 'old,' whatever that means.

“Seriously, when would you say old age begins? Are we simply as old as we feel? And what would that mean since it changes from day to day?”

That oft-repeated adage we've heard all our lives - you're only as old as you feel – is nonsensical. Since no one has before been the age they are, that's how that age feels. How could it be otherwise?

Further, is it possible for anyone to feel the same at 75 as they did at 60, 50, 40 or 30? I hope not. That would imply no change, no learning, no new knowledge over all those years. Events, experience, joys, tragedies, successes and failures (taking into account individual degrees of self-awareness) should and do change us, teach us and, sometimes, make us a little wiser. It happens only with the passage of time.

Now and then throughout most people's lives, someone, on being told our age, is bound to say, “Oh, you don't look that old,” and it is invariably taken as a compliment because to look old is the ultimate sin in American culture.

The pressure to look young surrounds us every day of our lives in newspaper and magazine advertisements, television commercials and such shows as Nip/Tuck, comedians' jokes and job-seeking advice. Oprah Winfrey has made the pursuit of youthful appearance a fetish for 20 years.

A lot of the cultural abhorrence of old age is the word “old” itself. Here is a list of synonyms for “old” from one online thesaurus:
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TIME GOES BY | Ageism 2011

by Ronni Bennett in Time Goes By blog

A few months ago, a local TV news program reported the “plight” of a 21-year-old, disabled woman living in a nursing home here in Portland, Oregon. She “found herself,” the news anchor read from the TelePrompTer, “with an elderly roommate with no way out.”

Imagine the uproar there would have been if the anchor had said, “found herself with a black roommate with no way out.” But aside from my own email which was not acknowledged, apparently no objection was raised to this blatant ageism.

On page 4 of his important manifesto on elders titled, What Are Old People For?, geriatrician Bill Thomas notes that “[O]ld people are exposed to a bigoted ageism that is openly expressed and widely accepted.”

No kidding. I have pages and pages full of them on my computer.

Another eminent geriatrician, Robert N. Butler, who died last year at age 83, coined the term “ageism” in the 1960s. He defined it thusly in his 2008 book, The Longevity Revolution:

“Ageism takes shape in stereotypes and myths, outright disdain and dislike, sarcasm and scorn, subtle avoidance, and discriminatory practices in housing, employment, pension arrangements, health care, and other services...”

“It is identical to any other prejudice in its consequences...Anthropologist Barbara Meyerhoff speaks about 'death by invisibility' when she describes an older woman who, 'unseen,' was 'accidentally' killed by a bicyclist.”

Ageism kills more slowly too. In a live interview at the Washington Post, long-time Yale researcher Becca Levy discussed her study on whether aging stereotypes affect the health of elders.

“[W]e have found that when we activate negative age stereotypes, older individuals tend to show a decline in memory performance, self-confidence, will to live and handwriting,” said Levy.

“In contrast, we have found that when we activate positive age stereotypes we tend to find beneficial changes in these same areas.”

Negative age stereotypes are everywhere in media. With no effort at all, just my daily reading, I run across them constantly. When I remembered to do so, I saved them during 2010. Here is a sampling – about five percent of what I found. The emphases are mine.

Gabe Starosta at congress.org, in complaining about poorly designed government websites, had this comparison to make about the Social Security site:

“This site's primary audience is the elderly or those approaching social security age, and designers say the site looks like it was designed by those very same people.”

Oblivious to the fact that people 46 and older make up 44 percent of all internet users, Christopher Beam repeats this theme in a recent technology story at Slate:

“As of 2010, the most-common Caps Lock users are enraged Internet commenters and the computer-illiterate elderly.”

Old people, you see, are not only incapable of doing anything associated with computers, they are equated with rage-aholics.

The second most commonly repeated stereotype in the media is how elders dress, what they eat and when they do it – always with disdain. This is Eleanor Clift (who is old enough to know better) writing at PoliticsDaily:

"By 2050, the United States will look like Florida, with more old people taking advantage of senior-citizen discounts and enjoying early-bird suppers.”

How is this different from writing, for example, “...black people enjoying watermelon and fried chicken” which she would never write and wouldn't get past her editor if she did?
Two days ago, Dan Brown at The New York Times repeated the slam:

”On New Year’s Day, the oldest members of the Baby Boom Generation will turn 65, the age once linked to retirement, early bird specials and gray Velcro shoes that go with everything.

Don't for a minute believe Mr. Brown's use of the historical “once linked” will have any effect on the ubiquitous use of this derisive theme.

Ageism regularly creeps into stories at that supposed bastion of progressive thinking, Alternet, but this one particularly wrankled.

Because most Americans are born into a family faith, it takes of a lot of self-reflection, soul-searching, discussion and reading on religion, philosophy and atheism itself to give up belief in god. So much so, it is unlikely the young have any useful commentary yet. But Jenny McCreight seems to believe atheism's leading literary figures can be dismissed (along with gender and race) for their age:

“The individuals most commonly associated with contemporary atheism—Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Victor Stenger—are all male, white and, well, kinda old (69, 61, 68 and 75).”

Then there is young mommyblogger, Julie Ryan Evans, whose five short paragraphs about the arrest of a 73-year-old who had overindulged in the caffeine/alcohol beverage Four Loko, overflow with repeated sarcasm of casual ageism that taken together reveal her contempt for old people:

”Apparently the drink has crept its way off of college campuses and into the hands of the geriatric crowd...

“Now one could wonder if he just didn't know what he was drinking and the power of the stuff. The older you get, the harder it is to read the fine print and all...

“It's not surprising that the older set is jumping on the Four Loko bandwagon. Aren't they always chasing the train trend of the young?...

“But like all fad fascinations, their coolness typically comes to an end ... usually just when the older generations discover them.”

With the possible exception of Ms. Evans, there is rarely intentional malice in these writers' negative references to elders. They come about through laziness - repeating words and phrases they read every day - and convention; unless you grew up in China or Japan, you've heard old people maligned all your life without ever being told it is as hateful as racist and sexist words.

Language matters. And repetition, as every advertiser knows, establishes credibility and familiarity. With each repetition, the product, service or idea becomes more deeply lodged in one's mind until even elders themselves sometimes do not recognize, in the case of ageism, that the idea is repellent.

Such memes as computer-illiterate old people interested only in the early-bird special at Denny's are repeated hundreds or thousands of times year after year until they are no longer perceived as demeaning and become how old people are acceptably defined – along with the consequences mentioned above.

After a long list of the many different ways elders are regularly discounted in newspapers, magazines, television, movies, the internet, even greeting cards, Dr. Butler, in his book The Longevity Revolution, wrote:

“It is time to change the language and imagery of old age in the media and sensitize journalists and writers about the language of ageism.”

Journalists and writers will not do it on their own so in this new year, it is time to take up Dr. Butler's challenge. Instead of just collecting instances of ageist language for a blog post like this one, emails need to be sent to the perpetrators clearly stating the reasons for objecting to their language. Each and every time it happens.

Today, I am asking you to help. Send me the references when you see them – the quote and the URL to the article. Most often, they are in stories unrelated to aging. There was no reason for Gabe Starosta to use an ageist reference to make the point that the Social Security website is poorly designed. Christopher Beam could easily write a technology story without dissing elders' computer skills.

You won't have any trouble finding these – they are painfully common. Once you are sensitized to them, you'll see them everywhere.

Send a letter to the writer and the editor of the publication. In due course, I will publish a template you can copy and easily adapt to individual circumstances. During the coming weeks and months, I'll devise a petition or two for us to use along with whatever other methods occur to me; your suggestions are welcome and sought.

Back in the 1960s, the civil rights movement made the N-word unacceptable. The women's movement made the word "girl" so toxic that I once saw a reference in The New York Times to a “15-year-old woman.”

When language changes, behavior changes. So this year, let's follow Saul Friedman's dictum as related by his wife Elke in last Saturday's post:

"The thread running through [Saul's] work was always the same: make the world a better place as best I can. In newspaperese: “The journalist’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

This year, let's help make the world a better place and do some afflicting.


TIME GOES BY | Ageism 2011

In Sickness and in Health - NYTimes.com

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By PAULA SPAN

There are few good housing options for elderly couples when one spouse is ill and the other is well.

“These are the hardest kind of situations we deal with,” said Emily Saltz of Elder Resources, a veteran geriatric care manager in greater Boston. “We don’t have good options for couples with differing health status.”

Yet almost every elderly couple will eventually fall into that category, she pointed out. Who ages at exactly the same rate?

It’s yet another quandary caused by lengthening life spans; more people over 60 are married, remarried or cohabiting than decades ago, when more were widowed. Ms. Saltz finds it no longer uncommon to work with couples in their 90s. Most want very much to continue living together. But it’s not easy.

Questions of how and where to live are complicated by the conviction that one spouse should shoulder the burden, sometimes the entire burden, of caring for the other. They see that as a duty, even as research repeatedly underscores the risks.

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Baby Boomers Turn 65, With Another Milestone to Redefine - NYTimes.com

Image via CrunchBaseBy DAN BARRY

In keeping with a generation’s fascination with itself, the time has come to note the passing of another milestone: On New Year’s Day, the oldest members of the Baby Boom Generation will turn 65, the age once linked to retirement, early bird specials and gray Velcro shoes that go with everything.

Though other generations, from the Greatest to the Millennial, may mutter that it’s time to get over yourselves, this birthday actually matters. According to the Pew Research Center, for the next 19 years, about 10,000 people “will cross that threshold” every day — and many of them, whether through exercise or Botox, have no intention of ceding to others what they consider rightfully theirs: youth.
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Real Life Among the Old Old - NYTimes.com

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeBy SUSAN JACOBY - Op-Ed Contributor New York Times

I RECENTLY turned 65, just ahead of the millions in the baby boom generation who will begin to cross the same symbolically fraught threshold in the new year to a chorus of well-intended assurances that “age is just a number.” But my family album tells a different story. I am descended from a long line of women who lived into their 90s, and their last years suggest that my generation’s vision of an ageless old age bears about as much resemblance to real old age as our earlier idealization of painless childbirth without drugs did to real labor.
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Baby Boomers Approach Age 65 -- Glumly - Pew Research Center

Image by thinkpanama via FlickrBy D’Vera Cohn and Paul Taylor, Pew Research Center

The iconic image of the Baby Boom generation is a 1960s-era snapshot of an exuberant, long-haired, rebellious young adult. That portrait wasn't entirely accurate even then, but it's hopelessly out of date now. This famously huge cohort of Americans finds itself in a funk as it approaches old age.

On Jan. 1, 2011, the oldest Baby Boomers will turn 65. Every day for the next 19 years, about 10,000 more will cross that threshold. By 2030, when all Baby Boomers will have turned 65, fully 18% of the nation's population will be at least that age, according to Pew Research Center population projections. Today, just 13% of Americans are ages 65 and older.

Perched on the front stoop of old age, Baby Boomers are more downbeat than other age groups about the trajectory of their own lives and about the direction of the nation as a whole.

Some of this pessimism is related to life cycle -- for most people, middle age is the most demanding and stressful time of life.¹ Some of the gloominess, however, appears to be particular to Boomers, who bounded onto the national stage in the 1960s with high hopes for remaking society, but who've spent most of their adulthood trailing other age cohorts in overall life satisfaction.

At the moment, the Baby Boomers are pretty glum. Fully 80% say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country today, compared with 60% of those ages 18 to 29 (Millennials), 69% of those ages 30 to 45 (Generation Xers) and 76% of those ages 65 and older (the Silent and Greatest Generations), according to a Pew Research Center survey taken earlier this month.

Boomers are also more downbeat than other adults about the long-term trajectory of their lives -- and their children's. Some 21% say their own standard of living is lower than their parents' was at the age they are now; among all non-Boomer adults, just 14% feel this way, according to a May 2010 Pew Research survey. The same survey found that 34% of Boomers believe their own children will not enjoy as good a standard of living as they themselves have now; by contrast, just 21% of non-Boomers say the same.²

The 79-million-member Baby Boomer generation accounts for 26% of the total U.S. population. By force of numbers alone, they almost certainly will redefine old age in America, just as they've made their mark on teen culture, young adult life and middle age.

But don't tell Boomers that old age starts at age 65. The typical Boomer believes that old age doesn't begin until age 72, according to a 2009 Pew Research survey. About half of all American adults say they feel younger than their actual age, but fully 61% of Boomers say this. In fact, the typical Boomer feels nine years younger than his or her chronological age.³


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Related articles

• Pew Piece on Baby Boomers Nails It (oklahomawomen.blogspot.com)
• Baby boomers near 65 with retirements in jeopardy (sfgate.com)
• Baby boomers facing retirements in jeopardy (msnbc.msn.com)
• The future ain't so bright for boomer retirees (capitolhillblue.com)
• Boomers feeling groovy, poll finds (financialpost.com)
• Leading edge of U.S. baby boomers content: survey (reuters.com)

Japanese Prisons Face Swelling Elderly Population

By MARI YAMAGUCHI
Handrails run down the middle of the hallway to help prisoners make their way from one end to the other. Adult diapers are neatly stacked in a corner. When an inmate chokes on his rice and coughs, a supervisor rushes over to rub his back.

Welcome to the world of old-age prisons. Japan's population is aging faster than anywhere else, and with that has come an even sharper rise in elderly inmates.

The number of Japanese prisoners aged 60 or older has doubled over the past decade to more than 10,000. That outpaces a 30 percent increase in the general population for that age group. The elderly now represent 16 percent of the nation's inmates.

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Related articles

• Huge Growth in The Elderly in Prison Numbers (socyberty.com)
• Florida Might Not Be Okay With Letting Seniors Die in Jail (uspoverty.change.org)

Betsy Stanford to turn 107

Image via WikipediaBy Ann Scott Tyson Washington Post Staff Writer

Betsy Stanford turns 107 years young on Tuesday, and the spunky matriarch from the District has no shortage of longevity advice - from dietary to spiritual to downright racy.

What to eat? Anything and everything. "Juicy steaks . . . pork chops - as much as you want!" Stanford exclaims. "Everything they say not to eat, I've been eating it since I was 45 years old."

These days, she admits to a particular fondness for a smoothie made of Guinness stout mixed with the nutritional supplement Ensure, a drop of vanilla flavoring and a sprinkle of nutmeg "if [the stout] is too bitter."

"I drink stout. It's good for you, baby!" Stanford said as she held forth with a group of relatives and fellow worshipers at her 107th birthday celebration Sunday at the Wesley United Methodist Church in Northwest.

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On the Road With, or Without, Elderly Parents - The New Old Age Blog - NYTimes.com

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By DALE RUSSAKOFF

It’s August, time for a vacation from everything stressful — work, commuting, heat, congestion. But what about caregiving? Do adult children of elderly parents deserve a break from them, too?

Plenty of New Old Age readers no doubt identify with a woman who, describing herself and her husband as “empty-nesters in our 50s,” recently raised this question in Slate’s provocative advice column, “Dear Prudence.” Bringing her husband’s 80-plus-year-old-parents along on vacations, the woman wrote, “is more stressful than going to work.”

The older couple “cannot travel as they used to,” making it difficult for the 50-somethings to relax together, which their punishing jobs rarely allow them to do. Yet her mother-in-law calls almost nightly, she wrote, “begging us to take them.” Her question: “Are we selfish to want to be alone on our vacations?”
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TIME GOES BY | Mistaken Cultural Expectations of Elders

by Ronni Bennett

Lilalia, a gifted artist who blogs at Yum Yum Cafe, sent me a link to a short, Guardian UK video interview with crime writer, P.D. James, a decades-long favorite of mine.

The occasion of the interview was Ms. James's 90th birthday earlier this week on 3 August. It is a smart discussion about some of her books and her primary protagonist, Adam Dalgliesh. When asked if there would be another Dalgliesh story forthcoming, Ms. James replied that their might be but, she added, acknowledging her age, “I hate the idea of dying in the middle of a book.”

The Guardian UK website does not allow embedding of their videos so you'll need to visit the site to see the interview [8:39 minutes]. Here is a screen grab from it.


Unlike childhood when stages of growth can be predicted to the week – sitting up unaided, walking, talking, etc. - old age develops in individuals at dramatically different rates. Some people, depending on genes, lifestyle, health and dumb luck, become decrepit at a relatively young age. Others, like Ms. James, defy cultural stereotypes of 90-year-olds.

Take a good look at Ms. James and watch her on that video. She could easily be taken for what people commonly think of as a 65- or 70-year-old, both physically and cognitively. What is important here is that she is not exceptional, exempt from debilities of extreme age for being an accomplished writer or any other special circumstance. Old age is a great leveler.

Many elders live to the age of Ms. James and beyond as well as she has and there will be more as the elder population increases due to the advances, during that past hundred years, in health care and understanding of it. Nevertheless, Ms. James is not the cultural expectation, which is in need an adjustment.

From time to time on this blog, we discuss and laugh about our decreasing stamina, aches and pains that have no apparent cause, and lament the minor vagaries of getting old such as wrinkles, loose skin, hair loss, weight gain, etc. while being grateful too for the invention of cataract repair and replacement joints. No one reaches their upper decades without some kind of affliction.

Old age, as most of life, is a crapshoot. No matter how well we have cared for our health through the years, on any day we can be struck with debility. But what P.D. James, being more publicly visible than most 90-year-olds, represents is that the majority of people who reach great age remain – within the context of waning strength - capable, productive contributors.

The reason we don't see more of them is that it is generally believed this is not so.

TIME GOES BY | Mistaken Cultural Expectations of Elders

Being There, Without Leaving Home - The New Old Age Blog - NYTimes.com

Image via CrunchBase

by Paula Span

At the Selfhelp Benjamin Rosenthal Senior Center in Queens, a social worker, Rachel Itzkowitz, is leading the weekly current events class, guiding participants through a series of discussions. What did they think about that shooting at the Mexican border? About higher compensation for first responders injured on Sept. 11? And what about the controversy over building a Muslim community center near the World Trade Center site?

With backing from Microsoft and the city’s Department for the Aging, Selfhelp has created a “virtual senior center” for about a dozen low-income elderly people, with six more scheduled to join the party at the end of the summer.

Even with big touch-screen monitors and an easy-to-use interface (called It’s Never Too Late), it took twice-a-week training for a couple of months before the new users could manage the equipment. Most had never used a computer. One who’d never learned to type found the QWERTY keyboard confusing, so Microsoft substituted one with keys in alphabetical order. The group has taken advantage of adaptations like magnifiers and screen readers that read text aloud.

Bringing older people online proved to be, in other words, a labor-intensive undertaking. But Selfhelp’s vice president for senior communities, Leo Asen, is convinced that the benefits justify it.

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Monitoring Elderly Parents - NYTimes.com

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It used to be that parents kept tabs on their children. But The Times reports this morning on new technology making it possible for adult children to monitor, to a stunningly precise degree, the daily movements and habits of their aging parents.

The purpose is to provide enough supervision to make it possible for elderly people to stay in their homes rather than move to an assisted-living facility or nursing home, and in truth many of the systems are godsends for families. But, as with any parent-child relationship, all loving intentions can be tempered by issues of control, role-reversal, guilt and a little deception — enough loaded stuff to fill a psychology syllabus.
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When I’m 164 - The New Old Age Blog - NYTimes.com

by Paula Span

My theory is that the more intensely involved we are with caring for the very old and sick, the less appealing the notion of ever-longer lifespans becomes.

I can practically hear legions of New Old Age readers — hip-deep in elder tasks, in decisions and tussles and exhausting responsibilities — chorusing, “More years of this? Please, no.” A number of older readers have expressed similar sentiments here themselves.

But what if longevity didn’t involve an extended period of managing chronic illnesses and coping with frailty and disability, as so often happens now? What if we were talking about years of health and vigor, decades or even centuries in which we barely felt the impact of age? About not merely (merely!) defeating killers like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, but achieving near-immortality?

Such visions, and the emerging science that might make them possible, have intrigued Jonathan Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, for years.
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