GBO NEWS: New Long-Term Care Database; Playing the COVID Nursing Home Card; Elder Despair and Suicide; 1991 Book’s “Crisis of 2020” Had Ageist Agenda; Pandemic in Cape Cod and Latinx LA; & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations – Our 27th Year.
June 12, 2020 — Volume 27, Number 7
EDITOR’S NOTE: GBONews, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. [pfkleyman@gmail.com]. To subscribe to GBONews.org at no charge, simply sending a request to Paul with your name, address, phone number and editorial affiliation or note that you freelance. For each issue, you’ll receive the table of contents in an e-mail, so just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org. GBONews does not provide its list to other entities.
In This Issue: We’ve washed our hands to “Happy Birthday” so often we’re older than Methuselah.
1. LEADS FROM LIZ: New COVID-19 Nursing Home Database
2. THE DOCTORS ARE IN (PRINT) ON COVID-19:
*** “Playing the Cards We are Dealt: Covid-19 and Nursing Homes,” by Joanne Lynn, MD, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society; *** “For Older People, Despair, as Well as Covid-19, Is Costing Lives,” by Louise Aronson, New York Times.
3. THE STORYBOARD (COVID Vicinities)
*** Senior Impact Series: Part 1 – “Pandemic Adds to Strain for Cape Grandparents Raising Grandchildren,” by Cynthia McCormick; Part 2 — “Panic Intensified Feelings of Seclusion for Seniors,” Cape Cod Times;
*** Senior Bleak Streets Series (Spanish/English): “American Workers’ Health Challenges Before Reaching the Golden Age,” Part 1; Part 2– “Undocumented Latino Seniors Struggle Without Pensions Health Insurance,” Part 3 – “Seniors Living on the Street With a Bleak Future,” by Agustin Durán, Spanish, La Opinión English translation, Diverse Elders Coalition.
4. GEN BEATLES NEWS: *** Dr. Rosalie Kane, Died at 79: *** RemembranceWell.com is the latest launch by Jay Newton-Small.
5. THE BOOKMOBILE: Crisis of 2020 “Prediction’s” Ageist Agenda (1991 Book Hit Social Security, Medicare)
News-Glut Note: This GBONews is chock full of pandemic news, and I’ve got stuff coming soon on criminal injustice gone gray. This editor’s little gray cells have been working on the events stemming from my hometown of Minneapolis, but not so much about elderhood per se. This issue includes lots on COVID, ageism and more that won’t go away soon. But outside of the aging context, I’ll share with you this piece I wrote about the George Floyd tragedy and one aspect underlying what has kept happening. It ran on the website LA Progressive — “How Did Our Policing Standard Become Institutionalized Cowardice?” (June 7, 2020).
1. LEADS FROM LIZ
New COVID-19 Nursing Home Database
By Liz Seegert
As we approach the halfway mark of 2020, many of us probably feel a bit like bears waking up from hibernation, or perhaps butterflies finally emerging from their Coronavirus cocoons.
The world is slowly returning to work and play, while the pandemic continues to take its toll on our nation’s most vulnerable — elders and people with underlying conditions. Sadly, many of the same people who are dying from this disease have experienced the life-long negative effects of health disparities. It’s yet another outcome of centuries of racial and social injustices.
Meanwhile, the stories of older adults need ongoing focus. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has finally released its database of COVID-19 cases in nursing homes. As of June 1, the document, which is updated weekly, shows 26,000 deaths and 60,000 cases in federally regulated facilities — and the number keeps climbing. If you add in assisted living facilities, the death count jumps to more than 40,000, according to USA Today.
The CMS database doesn’t even tell the entire story. Although all states are now required to report cases and deaths to CMS, to date, about 12% of them have yet to submit complete information. It makes one wonder what they’re trying to hide. Experts and advocates also believe many COVID-19 deaths were likely misclassified, according to this dashboard from CMS.
Additionally, resourceful journalists have flagged discrepancies between what some states report and what the federal government says. Some states include smaller facilities, such as group homes, in their reporting. Others don’t count residents who were transferred to hospitals and later died there. As always, it’s wise to cross-check the data with other sources
The CMS database is a good starting point for anyone reporting on this issue and will need close scrutiny as virus deaths increase. This helpful article from AARP (June 1, 2020) can also help guide reporters in finding state-level data and what a state is, or isn’t providing to the public.
Many facilities were unprepared for the surge of sick patients; workers — often people of color — may be working multiple jobs to make ends meet and therefore at greater risk to get sick themselves, or to bring the virus into their facilities. Congress is now looking into some of these issues.
Meanwhile, families still struggle to get answers from overworked staff or management who may be more concerned with their bottom lines than the wellbeing of their residents. And recent reports find that some nursing facilities are still accepting COVID-positive patients without always implementing proper protocols — a move this New York Times article describes as “playing Russian roulette.”
It’s absolutely the wrong game to play with frail elderly or the dedicated staff who care for them.
“Leads From Liz” columnist Liz Seegert is program coordinator forGBONews.org’s parent, the Journalists Network on Generations. A New York-based freelance journalist, she is also editor of the Association of Health Care Journalists’ Core Topic section on Aging.
2. THE DOCTORS ARE IN (PRINT) ON COVID
*** “Playing the Cards We are Dealt: Covid-19 and Nursing Homes,” by Joanne Lynn, MD, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS, June 2020): Long one of the most respected authorities on chronic care, Lynn in this essay, advises her fellow geriatricians to prepare for a substantial spike in coronavirus nursing home cases, despite masks, distancing and related precautions: “Even if a person keeps a 1% risk per day, that person has an 84% likelihood of having been infected within six months.” She adds, “Most people who reside or work in nursing homes seem likely to have COVID-19 infection before an effective vaccine becomes available.”
Lynn, a policy analyst and cofounder of the nonprofit Altarum Institute’s Program to Improve Eldercare, stresses that although nursing home residents often recover without hospitalization, “among community-dwelling persons 80 years old and older currently requiring critical care, only about 15% survive, usually with substantially increased disability. Rates for critically-ill nursing home residents are likely to be worse.”
She faults “the framing of recent leadership statements and government guidelines, which make broad claims that testing, social distancing, and personal protective equipment will keep people ‘safe.’ That image is comforting but misleading, since these current actions actually just avoid overwhelming the care system and delay having to take our turns at the roulette wheel of COVID-19.“
Lynn argues that the current strictures, such as entirely barring family visits in facilities, won’t curtail the disease’s spread. They don’t serve elders well and should be thoughtfully revised: “Keeping residents in solitary confinement for months seems cruel to residents, family, and friends. Can we expect residents to give up ever again feeling a human touch, seeing family members, joining in a song or attending a religious service?”
She continues, “Many nursing home residents and their families might prefer to take their risks with COVID-19 — rather than enduring a barren, but longer, survival. At the least, we should be asking residents and their families for their well-informed preferences before imposing severe isolation measures indefinitely.”
Moreover, Lynn states, “The scorn heaped on nursing homes for their infection and death rates is, for the most part, misplaced. Nearly all nursing homes will have their outbreaks. The novel coronavirus has put a spotlight on the inadequate funding and staffing of nursing homes. As we recover, long-term care and its financing should be re-imagined and reformed.”
Interested reporters can contact her at Joanne.Lynn@Altarum.org, @DrJoanneLynn.
*** “For Older People, Despair, as Well as Covid-19, Is Costing Lives,” by Louise Aronson, New York Times (June 8, 2020): “Earlier this month, a colleague who heads the geriatrics service at a prominent San Francisco hospital told me they had begun seeing startling numbers of suicide attempts by older adults. These were not cry-for-help gestures, but true efforts to die by people using guns, knives, and repurposed household items. Such so-called ‘failed suicides’ turn out to be the most extreme cases of a rapidly growing phenomenon among older Americans as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic: lives stripped of human contact, meaningful activity, purpose and hope that things will get better in a time frame that is relevant to people in the last decades or years of life. . . . The problem with this approach to Covid-19 is that it assumes that the coronavirus is the only threat to health and well-being.”
Aronson, author of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist Elderhood, recommends adjustments to current coronavirus-prevention practices, such as: Wear the right kind of mask in the right way when outside and recognize that wearing one is about having consideration and respect for the people around you.”
Also a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, she writes, “Nursing homes and assisted living facilities should provide small group walks with masks and social distancing, use outdoor places for socially distanced conversation and exercise and ensuring all residents have digital access to family and friends.”
Reporters can reach her at Louise.Aronson@ucsf.edu; (415) 502-1000 x14595.
3. THE STORYBOARD: COVID Vicinities
*** COVID-19 Senior Impact Series: Part 1 – “Pandemic Adds to Strain for Cape Grandparents Raising Grandchildren,” by Cynthia McCormick, Cape Cod Times (April 17, 2020): “Grandparents raising grandchildren serve as mother and father to the youngest victims of the opioid and mental health crisis. With the coronavirus pandemic, they also are called upon to be teacher, entertainment director and chief reassurance officer to a generation whose energy reserves can far outstrip their own.”
The story continues, “’It does take a toll,” said Ellen Grady, 66, of Hyannis, who with her husband, Brian, 67, is raising a 4-year-old granddaughter, McKinley Walsh. Brady said McKinley is a joy to be around and keeps her feeling young as well as up-to-date with the latest in educational technology. But the closing of schools and businesses that has thrown the family of three together around the clock has disrupted routines, play dates and downtime, Brady said. . . . Not just school and extracurricular activities but also in-person supports such as counseling and other services for traumatized children have been canceled by the coronavirus outbreak, said Kerry Bickford, who from 2009 to 2019 was an officer of the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Grandparents Raising Grandchildren.”
Part 2 — “Panic Intensified Feelings of Seclusion for Seniors,” (April 25, 2020): “Deprived of her volunteer role at the Barnstable Adult Community Center because of the coronavirus pandemic, Martina Ross of Hyannis has developed a new routine. Every weekday morning she drives to the senior center on Route 28 and waits in a parking lot, often with a book, for the Grab-and-Go meal program to open up. Ross, 74, said . . . the real sustenance comes from seeing other people, albeit briefly, through a car window, while wearing a mask. “I can’t get out of the car, but I talk to my friends. Little short conversations. But at least it’s people I know,” said Ross.”
The story goes on, “One of the particularly cruel aspects of the coronavirus pandemic is that older people who are susceptible to the ill effects of the disease are also likely to be living alone and feeling the full impact of social isolation. Census bureau estimates from 2006 and 2008 indicate that 39% of people age 65 or older in Barnstable County are living alone. That’s a large number, since 30.6% of Cape Cod’s approximately 213,000 population is 65 or older.
*** Senior Bleak Streets Series (Spanish/English): “American Workers’ Health Challenges Before Reaching the Golden Age,” Part 1 — by Agustin Durán — La Opinión (March 25, 2020): Subhead: The health care hardships when you are not rich, you are not poor and you are not yet old enough to get Medicaid (MediCal in California).” Link in Spanish: “Los altos costos médicos ponen en jaque a miles de estadounidenses,” (25 de Marzo, 2020)
The story in English cites USC gerontologist María Aranda, who said those not poor enough for Medicaid, but have low incomes have few options for healthcare, ‘until they reach retirement age and can make use of the Medicare program. That is why, many decide to go to Tijuana for medical treatment, take home remedies, and delay visits to the doctor hoping that the pain will go away on its own, but it only gets worse.’” According to a 2019 study by American Cancer Society in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, 137.1 million Americans have faced financial hardship during the past year because of medical costs; situation that was more common among people from 18 to 64 years old.”
Part 2– “Undocumented Latino Seniors Struggle Without Pensions Health Insurance,” by Agustín Durán, La Opinión: Subhead: Many people without documents wait until the last moment to see a doctor, others trust their faith not to get sick. In Spanish: “Llegar a la tercera edad como inmigrante, sin pensión y sin seguro medico,” (28 de Marzo, 2020): “Estela García is not intimidated. She walks a lot, eats as healthfully as possible and stays positive. In general, this is the recipe that has allowed her, at the age of 84, to stay healthy. As an undocumented immigrant, living in the midst of one of the world’s most frightening pandemics, self-care and a positive outlook are what keeps her going. ‘I just don’t panic,’ she emphasized, ‘but I don’t watch television either.’”
Part 3 – “Seniors Living on the Street With a Bleak Future,” La Opinión (May 9, 2020); English–DEC website: “The first thing Gerado recommends to young people so that they do not end up on the street is to learn a trade with which they can maintain themselves their whole life. He did not have one and at 55, when he lost his job, nobody wanted to hire him. Today, at 65 years of age, he lives on tips from an East Los Angeles supermarket and bounces around from shelter to shelter to have one less expense.”Chris Estrada of the Los Angeles Center for Community Law and Action (LACCLA) said this group “is one of the most vulnerable to current problems: due to high rent costs, unemployment and now the COVID-19. Furthermore, he explains, it is easier to abuse them, because they are not informed; they do not know how to defend themselves, and most of them live on a fixed income and have no other option.”
*** “60% of Virginia’s COVID-19 deaths came from long-term care, but state code bars knowing which homes,” by Luanne Rife, Roanoke Times (May 16, 2020): “On April 10, Gov. Ralph Northam announced he had assembled a task force to protect frail, elderly Virginians after 32 of them had died while in long-term care and a Richmond-area home was in the grips of one of the nation’s deadliest outbreaks. . . . Those deaths accounted for nearly 60% of the 1,002 Virginians claimed by the virus. . . . Northam’s administration has refused to name the homes where cases have been identified, or even to say where they are located. . . . Virginia is an outlier among its neighbors. North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland and West Virginia all routinely publish the names and locations of facilities with the virus, along with the number of residents and staff infected, and the number who have died.”
The story continues that the Alzheimer’s Association, Virginia Chapters, called on policymakers to implement necessary reporting. Rife reported, “The nursing home and assisted living industry has donated a substantial amount of money in recent years — more than $1 million each year, according to the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project — to lawmakers and political action committees. . . . Northam’s PAC, The Way Ahead, has accepted $48,000 from the nursing home industry since 2018. Other legislators have accepted tens of thousands of dollars each from the industry in the past few years. Legislators who have been vocal about wanting to change the law said they aren’t anticipating immense pushback from the nursing home industry.”
*** “COVID-19 Is Hitting Older Workers Like a Sledgehammer — Here’s What Congress Can Do,” commentary by Fay Lomax Cook and Elaine Weiss, The Hill (May 1, 2020): The writers, leading experts on the economics of aging, summarized findings in a report they helped develop for the National Academy of Social Insurance. NASI is a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank on the social safety net. The report came out of the group’s Social Security policy innovations challenge that identified four complementary first steps in this direction.
Cook and Weiss wrote, “Like millions of others, workers ages 50 and older are losing their jobs (and their health coverage) and are struggling to navigate severely overwhelmed state unemployment Insurance. systems. Their odds of being rehired when the economy begins to reopen, however, may be lower than those of their younger counterparts.”
Among NASI’s recommendations: 1.) Change regulations for those claiming early Social Security benefits so they can start and stop benefit receipt as needed or claim partial benefits, which would facilitate gradual retirement. 2.) Congress should reduce the lifelong penalty associated with early claiming of Social Security benefits from at ages 62-66, and enact a “bridge benefit” for vulnerable older workers needing to claim Social Security early. Also, the government should also offer a state-level strategy to further boost retirement security through Supplementary Social Security. Policymakers should also expand Medicare coverage as well as state-level strategies to address caregiving needs.
4. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** Dr. Rosalie Kane, Died at 79: GBO’s editor is among the older hands on the generations beat who interviewed the University of Minnesota gerontologist over the years. While we don’t acknowledge the death of many in the aging field of aging, she and her late husband, Robert “Bob” Kane, MD, were among a few prime couples who fortified the field at its humanistic core. She died at her Minneapolis home on May 5. Rosalie was especially supportive of my efforts in the early 1990s to build the network of journalists on aging to which you, good reader, are connected.
Harry “Rick” Moody, editor of “Human Values in Aging,” wrote that Rosalie, a professor of social work and public health, “I remember most of all our wonderful arguments, always respectful but neither of us giving in easily.” Recently she wrote to him about the coronavirus pandemic: “A learned discussion on triaging and rationing of a [ventilators], though more basic, is no system to count working vents or people who can use them. And more basic than that, no clarity about people power anywhere — not just doctors and nurses but environment protectors, aka cleaners.”
Had she lived even a few weeks longer, she certainly would have brought more “clarity about people power” to the protests over the killing of George Floyd across town.
Moody added that her friend and colleague, Helen Kivnick, PhD, said, “She was brilliant. She was generative. She was complicated. She was funny. She was persistent. She was demanding. She was quirky. She was uncompromising. She was infinitely competent and seemingly tireless. She never gave up on people or ideas she believed in.”
*** RemembranceWell.com is the latest launch by the ever-enterprising Jay Newton-Small. The veteran Time Magazine political reporter and bestselling author of
Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works (Liberty Street, 2016), she established MemoryWell.com three years ago to connect professional journalists with families with an elder in long-term care.
After having to move her father into a nursing home as his Alzheimer’s disease worsened,
Newton-Small developed an easily read biography of his life, enabling facility staff to have a deeper sense of who he was. A career diplomat from Australia, Graham Newton-Small was mentored by Winston Churchill and lived in locations worldwide. That included a stint in Ethiopia, which endeared him to two of his Ethiopian caregivers in his Washington, D.C. area memory care unit. Jay developed a simple multimedia biographical format that facilities could make available to family members, who’d be matched with a professional journalist through her organization.
To date, MemoryWell contracts with about 35 major long-term care companies and has a roster of around 700 writers around the country to pair, as deemed appropriate, with families.
In time, though, she discovered another untapped area for the telling of life stories: “Have your loved one’s obituary told professionally” is the tag. The site’s About page explains, “We are a group of journalists from some of the most prestigious news outlets in the nation: TIME Magazine, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and many more. . . . But few people get the newspaper obituary treatment. Most families have to settle for a brief death notice that strips a person’s life down to a few lines of data: Born, Married, Worked, Died. That doesn’t capture a soul. . . . We write obituaries that go beyond the facts to show the fullness of people’s lives and personalities. . . Families can also build out interactive timelines, adding in their own memories, photos, readings, video and audio clips. They can also print the stories and timelines into books.”
Starting with a 30-60 minute family interview, Remembrance Well usually turns out the obit in a couple of days, although they can do so in 24 hours for an additional fee. GBONews readers interested in possibly working with Memory Well or Remembrance Well may contact Jay Newton-Small at jay@memorywell.com , or phone (202) 460-0424.
5. THE BOOKMOBILE
Crisis of 2020 “Prediction’s” Ageist Agenda (1991 Book Hit Social Security, Medicare)
“The Crisis of 2020” – imagined in the 1991 book Generations by Neil Howe and the late William Strauss — is attracting new media attention, as a New York Times story put it, for envisioning “an unspecified calamity that ‘could rival the gravest trials our ancestors have known’ and serve as ‘the next great hinge of history.’ It could be an environmental catastrophe, they wrote, a nuclear threat or ‘some catastrophic failure in the world economy.’”
Journalists so love predictions, even if one approaching a round-numbered anniversary, such as 30, is only kind of accurate. Why not the decade starting in 2000 (the dot-bomb, 9/11), or 2010 (The Great Recession)? Wasn’t Nostradamus sort of right some of the time?
In the case of Generations there’s even less than meets the policy eye. Already, pieces in Forbes (March 31, 2020) and the NYT (May 29, 2020) have advanced what GBO’s editor expects to be a spate of stories about the prescience of Strauss and Howe in the 537-page tome I read back then as a lighjt-weight polemic against the greedy old and their ravenous appetite for government largess at the expense of future generations. Think I’m exaggerating? Read on.
The book and its well-placed Washington authors were certainly influential. As NYT business journalist Jeremy W. Peters gushed, it “introduced a provocative theory that American history unfolds in boom-to-bust cycles of roughly 80 years. Their conclusions about the way each generation develops its own characteristics and leadership qualities influenced a wide range of political leaders, from liberals like Bill Clinton and Al Gore to pro-Trump conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Stephen K. Bannon. Seems as if they were on to something. So now what?” The book actually inspired Bannon to base a film on it.
Precipitating said Crisis of 2020, the authors posited, would be a societal collapse so momentous as to spin a “fourth turning.” Turnings, they explained, are major cultural shifts coming every four generations (about 80 years), since the first Puritan colonies settled in America in numbers substantial enough to spawn the first colonial-born generation, starting in 1584. Somehow, in their calculus, the 1960s didn’t make the big turn.
The many gaping holes in Strauss and Howe’s calendars are only part of the problem for financial and political writers looking for a crystal ball to give them an easy piece on deadline. Even more nettlesome is that the authors also shifted from fascinating scholarship to conservative ideology, as their “theory’ moved into the 20th century.
Fully titled, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069 (Morrow) the book exhaustively documents 13 generations in their historical influences on each cohort and with impressive scholarship through the first 11. Their meticulous historical accounting changes, though, with the arrival of what they label the GI Generation. After saving the world from Hitler and Tojo, according to Howe and Strauss, those GI’s returned to a nation so grateful that it “encouraged them to overreach as they approached elderhood—a hubris that appeared arrogant and soulless to their juniors.” Huh?
That’s the GI, or WWII Generation, which was smeared as “Greedy Geezers” in the late 1980s, that is, until Tom Brokaw rescued their reputation as “The Greatest Generation.”
More wary readers of Generations and the authors’ subsequent books didn’t have to go far before the authors’ prime target became clear. Social Security and Medicare manifest as deficit-hungry entitlement programs as the “Boom Generation,” in their labeling, nips at their GI parents’ heals.
The fundamental flaw of any age-based political analysis is in crossing the divide between the influences of historical events on broad traits, such as the frugal tendencies of many who grew up in the Great Depression, and over to demographic judgmentalism. A critical reading always needs to inquire about possible conflicts in an author’s motivation. Do a “theory’s” proponents have a policy purpose? In this case, Strauss and Howe stepped over the line and into a pile of ageist political prescriptions. Reporters planning to write about their “Crisis of 2020,” need to include the misses as well as the hits.
For instance, Strauss and Howe discerned an “inner-driven era” beyond the book’s 1991 release to 2003, a period when they expected WWII GIs to reach elderhood. The authors conjured up a shift toward concerns of “80-year-olds (long-term custodial care, access to life-extending technologies).” The declared, “The GI [political] lobbies will make the case with Silent [Generation] support and Boom acquiescence, that their generation is ‘entitled’ to the best available health care, regardless of income, or, more important, age.” Oh, the greed!
Get that—think of today’s Medicare for All, or proposals to strengthen Social Security for very poor, ethnic elders or older women as untoward governmental goals of rapacious generations.
The two rail on throughout the latter portions of the book against the concept of universal medical coverage, including long-term care for those with debilities. That’s not historical projection; it’s taking sides in a partisan political debate.
As for those aging Silents, the Boomer’s older siblings, the authors dreamed of a generation equipped with “a libertarian sense of equity” that would hem in GI and Boomer profligacy. The Silents, they wrote, would insist that their “nonpoor members get back the Social Security and Medicare money they once paid into the trust funds, maybe with a little interest, but nothing more. Entitlement programs will, thus, begin moving toward ‘means testing,’ targeting benefits on the needy.”
That’s not a fact-based forecast, but a very controversial political position, one far off the mark. (I’ll be happy to explain why “means testing” is a one-sided political position that even centrist liberals regard as a damaging to lower-income people to anyone who drops me a note. It’s too long to go into much here. Just think of the vast disparities of Medicaid, as one example.)
The authors’ predictive powers failed to account for such knowns of 1991 as the deepening decline of private pensions and the growing income gap in household wealth that has presented our aging nation with a looming retirement crisis for the middle class.
As for the prudent generation they touted so lovingly: “In electoral politics, the Silents will be slow to make up their minds, and more swayed than others by candidates with high name recognition, impressive credential and proven management skills.” Grant them right on the “name recognition”—hitting one out of three, though, is only good in baseball. They added, “On the surface they will delight in zany, iconoclastic rhetoric, yet underneath they will insist on genial, flexible temperaments.” There are many more zany missteps about the future of older generations, most of those guesses about as subtle as the old electronic calculator showing the ballooning National Debt. You, know, that’s the one we haven’t seen since the GOP voted for $1.5 trillion in tax breaks for their 1% sponsors.
Oddly, the NYT’s Peters concluded his article suggesting, “If the pandemic doesn’t loosen the boomer generation’s grip on American government, some see hope that it will end the brand of conservativism that has thrived during their time in power.” He quotes Steve Bannon saying he’s primed for Strauss and Howe’s “fourth turning” and has tossed his copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged “in the shredder.”
The Boomer’s grip on power? Peters might have gotten a more bottom-up view than the Ivy League vista downward from the White House through Clinton and George W (Yale), Obama (Harvard Law) and, Trump (Warton, if grudgingly). His Times story quotes no liberal experts familiar with generational issues.
In speculating on contemporary problems, rather than exploring the many policy layers of entrenched divisions, such as in health and economic insecurity, Peters embraced Strauss and Howe’s inherently ageist framing. His NYT article (not run as an op-ed) attributes the current U.S. mess to a “generational realignment in American politics hastened by the failure of the baby boomer generation to lead the nation out of its quagmire.” It’s a generational imperative – not power politics and its uncontrolled campaign spending – that don’t “bode well for President Trump or the Republicans.”
The “failure of the boomer generation”? Did the NYT have an editor in the house? What if he had written, “the failure of suburban women,” or of “young voters”? Exit poll categories have their place, but not for blanket blame for societal flaws.
As for the authors, Bill Strauss, who died in 2007, was brilliant in many ways and co-wrote a good book on the Vietnam War. He was also a comedian with an attitude. That’s a compliment—he was cofounder and chief writer/performer for the Capitol Steps political parody troupe, which he created with two fellow congressional aides to Sen. Charles H. Percy, Republican of Illinois. Funny Republicans, imagine that.
When we met in 1989, at the American Society on Aging conference in Washington, D.C., he told me he regarded the professionals surrounding us at a reception—mostly Silents and Boom-age social workers, nurses, sociologists and nonprofit service-agency directors—as a crowd out to drain the nation’s government resources to pad their own future. He was serious, and I didn’t laugh. I told him that with few exceptions those same people were among the most humane, dedicated and caring people I’d had the pleasure of reporting on, which is why I chose to work in aging. He didn’t laugh.
Howe is a speaker and author of about a dozen books on global aging, long-term fiscal policy, and migration. He’s a senior associate of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he helps direct the CSIS Global Aging Initiative. That’s an internationally respected economic entity that for 25 years has urged countries to reduce their budgetary supports for their aging populations before the old bankrupt their limited resources. Really. Look at what they’ve proposed for decades.
Howe also does a podcast for an investment advisory firm. Along with the late billionaire Peter G. Peterson, co-founder of the Blackstone Group private equity firm and a Commerce Secretary in the Nixon Administration, Howe coauthored the 1988 book, On Borrowed Time, How the Growth in Entitlement Spending Threatens America’s Future. Peterson bankrolled the anti-entitlement Concord Coalition, where Howe is still connected, and a range of other such efforts to undermine public confidence in the program and promoted its partial privatization.
So what? Strauss and Howe were/are Washington political operatives with an agenda. But does their predictive authoritativeness hold up, as “eerily correct,” in the NYT’s Peters’ words? That depends on where one reads.
They conjectured in 1991 about what “the 1990s will bring” for the “13er” generation (eventually called Gen X). They stated, “Coming-of-age 13ers will game the system without any pretense of higher principle.” Their peculiar stabs at generational psychobabble didn’t only insult the old; ageist opprobrium doesn’t have to start at 65. But also, legitimate population analysis can only be credible if it examines the ethnic and economic diversity of these generations, Generations only skirted social forces such as health and income disparities.
So many issues are converging in what is, indeed, a crisis of 2020, with a pandemic, reckoning with racial violence and, for those reading below the fold, a traffic jam of regulatory affronts to the environment, educational system, voter suppression, food stamp cuts, mounting homelessness and so much worse.
But a friend reminded me of one positive and steady source of ongoing support for millions. And it’s the main target of Wall Street and the politicians they can buy. She said, “I’m so grateful for Social Security right now. At least I can count on that.”
There’s your “Rumpelstiltskin,” Mr. Howe, for all of the young people that you and yours told, “Social Security won’t be there when you get old.” Another lie goes Poof! before the truth.
The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online News (GBONews.org). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. Copyright 2020 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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