GBO NEWS: Dream of MLK As Activist Ager at 84; Age Boom Reporters in NYC
GBO NEWS: GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations
Aug. 28, 2013 — Volume 13, Number 12
Editor’s Note: The new “GBO News” marks the 20th year of the Journalists Network on Generations. Click through this table of contents to the full issue at www.gbonews.org. This format is “scalable” for computer, e-pad or mobile. Let us know what you think of the new format.
IN THIS ISSUE: A Reporter’s Labor Day—for Jobs and Free Expression
1. A DREAM OF MLK TODAY–Aging Against the Machine
2. THE CONFERENCE BEAT: Reporters’ Age Boom Academy in New York
3. BOOK BEAT: New Biography of “Ageism” Coiner, Robert N. Butler, MD: Visionary of Healthy Aging; Celebrate 100: Centenarian Secrets to Success in Business and Life
4. RESOURCES: Online Health and Aging Library in 13 Asian Languages
1. MY DREAM OF MLK TODAY—AGING AGAINST THE MACHINE
Fifty! Really? Fifty years.
This week’s anniversary celebration of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom resounds with a worthwhile mix of critical reassessment and historical pride for the progress made since then and yet to be accomplished. But for my Boomer generation, the tumultuous events bookended by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and his tragic assassination five year later also arc across a half-century of our lives.
Fifty. Fifty years? How unsettling for aging Boomers, who once pictured nostalgia on an old-timey gazebo—echoing with the Beatles’ refrain, “It was 20 years ago today, Sargent Pepper taught the band to play.” Twenty years? Ha! Just a couple of generational blinks.
More than a cause for personal reflection, though, it’s hard not to wonder about King himself. Had he survived James Earl Ray’s gun sight, he would be 84 today. And I’d like to think he’d be as up on political hip-hop, like Goodie Mob’s new “Age Against the Machine” album released Thursday (after 14 years their poke at Rage Against the Machine), as, say, Curtis Mayfield or Odetta.
Younger Than Mandela
Still relatively youthful, King today would be 11 years younger than Nelson Mandela, who was still lifting his voice for justice until his recent illness, and five years younger than fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter. Both are members of The Elders, the global council of senior leaders currently chaired by Kofi Annan, age 75, who actively continues to negotiate for peace and freedom.
Had King lived on, of course, he would not be the indelible worldwide icon. Yet, I think it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that his graying countenance would join those of the other activists on The Elders’ website and living rounds. The Longevity Revolution is not only televised and on the Internet, it represents a new level of later-life vigor empowering more and more people to build on their active legacies long in defiance of stereotypical aging.
Of course, the Longevity Revolution can swing both ways. One of the more unsettling factoids I’ve heard lately about our aging world is that the average age of the Rolling Stones exceeds that of the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts, 58, likely has years left to revamp the Constitution in his conservative image.
Still, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, 80, made it clear in last Sunday’s (Aug. 25) New York Times that regardless of two bouts with cancer–she works out twice a week now—she has no intention of stepping down. Could she become the first centenarian justice, never to give up? Ginsberg is set on countering Roberts’ majority on issues, such as voting rights and job discrimination, subjects of her recent dissents—and major themes of King’s efforts a half century ago.
Were King alive and an activist ager today, it’s easy to imagine him expanding on his primary dreams, as have those among The Elders. (He could claim seniority in the group over such members as Ela Bhatt, founder of Self-Employed Women’s Association of India, who turns 80 on Sept. 7, and Bishop Desmond Tutu, who will be 82 on Oct. 7.)
A Life-Span View of Poverty
Although I’d fully expect King to have elevated his resonant voice on the travesties of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant, I don’t think it’s a stretch of imagination to believe he’d have embraced a life-span view of the economic security issues for lower-income Americans throughout their working and retirement years.
After all, since King was killed while championing the rights of striking sanitation workers is Memphis, labor negotiations and strikes have focused not only on traditional pay and working conditions, but increasingly on pensions and health care, including retirement health protections.
As King would have aged, he would surely have seen elders’ security underlying his principle concerns. Even travesties of the criminal justice system—intensified by three-strikes laws and “stop, question and frisk” policing–have yielded a growing population of elderly prisoners. (See “The Other Death Sentence: Aging and Dying in America’s Prisons” by investigative journalist James Ridgeway, and “Graying Prisoners” by Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch.)It’s always risky to project viewpoints on an historic figure who has passed.
But I feel confident that a living Martin Luther King, whose very legacy is based in unsung and often unpopular causes, would have grown especially cognizant of how challenges to economic and health security jeopardize the very health and longevity of lower-income minorities, women and other vulnerable groups as they age.Last fall, for example, the MacArthur Foundation Network on Aging in Society released a report showing that both African American men and white women who have low educational levels live 10 years shorter than whites with advanced academic degrees. Education is not only an issue for youth.
It’s easy enough to report on this or that new study, but as with research on issues of race, gender and class, the stream of scholarly findings on aging floods into a stagnant pool reflecting darkly on 21st century life in the United States unless things change.
Connecting the Dots From Age to Justice
Here are only some of the kind of factual dots I believe King could not have avoided connecting now:
- • One-third of Americans 65-plus are “economically insecure—lacking the resources needed to meet basic food, housing, and medical needs,” according to a 2012 United States of Aging a 2012 survey by the National Council on Aging, UnitedHealthcare and USA Today.
- More than half of Americans worry that their savings and income will not be sufficient to last them for the rest of their lives, according to a 2013 follow-up of the same poll released last month.
- Almost six in 10 African Americans and nearly half of Latinos are concerned they won’t be able to pay for a nursing home or other long-term care, compared to 41 percent of whites, found a new national poll by the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and SCAN Foundation.
- Despite calls to cut Social Security, about half of older Latinos, African Americans and Asians relied on Social Security for almost all of their income in 2008, compared to one in three whites, according to UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research.
- Jobs for older workers? In spite of the Roberts court having made it tougher to prove age discrimination in 2009, federal age bias claims have climbed to 25,000 a year, with many more filed at the state level.
Alive and Tweeting?
Were King alive and kicking today, I’d like to think he’d not only be among the fast-growing ranks of elders going online and social networking, but he’d be taking on the Digital Divide as a serious economic divide—and health–issue for impoverished seniors.
For instance, in July AARP’s Public Policy Institute released an issue paper showing that U.S. Internet providers are resisting efforts for them to bring high-speed connections to lower-income and rural areas. But so-called broadband connections could enable more seniors to live independently, staying more healthy, safe and out of nursing homes. That’s because new technology makes it possible for elders to reduce their isolation from family, and even to see their doctors by video and get medical tests at home.
In spite of these potentially life- and budget-saving technologies, though, the AARP report says major commercial Internet providers “have convinced 19 state legislatures to prevent or discourage cities or towns from owning or operating high-speed Internet networks” that might help seniors and their families, but cut into their market share.
Martin Luther King at 84? You wouldn’t want to miss his Twitter feeds to be found-where else?—@StillDreaming.
This article also ran on New America Media, with support from The Atlantic Philanthropies for coverage of economic security for elders.
2. THE CONFERENCE BEAT
Reporters’ Age Boom Academy in New York
The Age Boom Academy, a seminar on longevity issues for reporters, will bring 15-20 journalists from around the United States to the Big Apple, Sept. 8-10. Started by the late Dr. Robert N. Butler’s International Longevity Center (ILC), the program is now organized by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Graduate School of Journalism Continuing Education Division, in conjunction with ILC.
The program includes a broad survey of issues in aging with some of the top experts in the country on health, economic and social aspects of aging. Current or former journalists on the speakers list are Paula Span, editor of the New York Times “New Old Age” blog and Columbia Grad School adjunct journalism prof; Dorothy Brown, editor of the UnRetiring blog and a former editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer; and former New York Times Magazine editor Jack Rosenthal, who now chairs, ReServe, a nonprofit matching older professionals with civic organizations.
Reporters not attending this year may want to look over the conference agenda for possible story sources. Key among the speakers will be Mailman dean and respected gerontologist Linda P. Fried, MD, MPH, addressing an alternative way to understand the benefits and costs of aging; University of Illinois, Chicago, demographer S. Jay Olshansky, PhD, on “Longevity: Global Context and America”; Harvard’s Lisa Berkman, PhD, and others on the public safety net for elders and their families; University of Washington social gerontologist and author Wendy Lustbader, MSW, examining what older adults have to say about the issues facing them and our aging society; Kaiser Family Foundation VP Tricia Neuman, ScD, on age and economics; “Hammerin’ Hank” Henry Aaron, PhD, of the Brookings Institution, on Social Security. Others will speak on scams targeting seniors, Medicare and Medicaid, housing and older workers.
Among the news organizations reporters will represent are the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Irish Times, New York Times, Salt Lake Tribune, Sun-Sentinel (South Florida), and Washington Post.
3. BOOK BEAT
**Speaking of ILC Founder Dr. Bob Butler, Columbia University Press just released, Robert N. Butler, MD: Visionary of Healthy Aging, by W. Andrew Achenbaum, professor of social work and history at the University of Houston, long regarded as one of the leading social gerontologists in the field. Butler, who died in 2010, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose accomplishments describe the study and practice of gerontology and geriatric medicine over the last half century. Butler, who coined the term “ageism” in 1969, was a powerful supporter of age-beat reporters and actively urged colleagues to spend time helping and educating interested journalists in the issues of aging.
*** Celebrate 100: Centenarian Secrets to Success in Business and Life, is new book by Lynn Peters Adler, founder and head of the National Centenarian Awareness Project (NCAP) and economics writer-speaker Steve Franklin. Published by Wiley, the book is based on Adler’s video interviews and extensive surveys of more than 500 centenarians. Adler told GBO News that not only have these people lived for a century—and what a century it’s been – they’ve experiences the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, two World Wars, the Space Age, the Digital Age and 9/11.
The Atlanta-based Franklin contacted Adler several years ago, after she appeared on a Barbara Walters special on longevity. Adler was a primary consultant on the program. The book’s six chapters distill perspectives of the super-agers into chapters that dovetail the distinct business and philosophical bents of its two authors: the passage of time, career, money, time management, secrets of longevity and capturing and sharing wisdom. It also includes over 50 color photos of centenarians featured in interviews.
Journalists interested in a review copy can contact Wiley publicist Melissa Torra at mtorra@wiley.com; phone: 201-748-6834. And you can reach Adler, who is based in Connecticut, with questions or interview requests at lynn@adler100.org.
4. RESOURCES
Online Health and Aging Library in 13 Asian Languages: The National Asian Pacific Center on Aging (NAPCA), based in Seattle, has launch a collection of easily accessible health-information website in 13 Asian and Pacific Islander (API) languages. This online library includes over 700 resources, covering 26 topical areas. NAPCA explained in a release that it first developed the AAPI Healthy Aging Resource Center in 2011 “to increase access to culturally appropriate resources for limited English-speaking AAPI elders.” The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration on Aging is supporting the project. Resources are culled from reputable organizations, health departments, and foundations. NAPCA says it is continually updating the library and adding resources in such languages, besides English, as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hmong, Hindi and Burmese. For more information, contact Alula Jimenez Torres, NAPCA Healthy Aging Program Manager. NAPCA President & CEO Christine Takada Christine@napca.org is also great for quotes and referrals to other sources on intra-Asian diversity.
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