The Christian Science Monitor writes about the Brooke Astor case in NYC, and how elder abuse is happening more and more -- with family members the culprit. The Monitor reports that this is happening so much partly because people are living longer. I suspect that as the Baby Boomers age, stories like this will explode -- in part because they'll be happening more often, and in part because the Boomers set the media and cultural agenda, period.
Humans being human, we've always had elder abuse among us, but surely when cultural norms exalted the elderly, this sort of thing was more rare. Don't you think? When I was growing up, everyone looked up to the elderly, and treated them with great respect. That sort of thing got into my bones -- I know, I know, a Southern thing again -- such that I was constantly frustrated for the three years I lived in south Florida. So many of the elderly down there were rude and undignified. They didn't behave like old people I was used to. They didn't invite respect. To be perfectly honest, many of those I encountered behaved like self-centered teenagers. By the end of my three years there, I felt weirdly hostile to the elderly. Which went away after I moved out of south Florida.
I wonder if the mobility we enjoy in contemporary America has had the effect of straining the communal bonds and traditions that taught us to automatically respect the elderly, and fit them into the web of community life. As the Boomers age, with their children living far away, they will be more isolated, and more vulnerable. The radical individualism that characterizes American society -- something that the Boomers have championed -- will come back to hurt them in their elderly years. It's also the case that the Boomers inaugurated the modern Cult of Youth -- and I fear they are going to suffer from this in the future. Peter Augustine Lawler had a good essay about how the coming healthcare crisis as the Boomers age will force us to reassess how we've come to live and to think of society and our place in it. Those traditions of esteeming the elderly came from somewhere, after all:
But there is also something deeply inadequate about viewing old age in terms of individual “ownership” of one’s own destiny. The aging society, after all, will confront us with the realities of human neediness. Freedom from “want and fear,” to the extent such freedom is humanly attainable, will require the old accepting the inevitability of their growing dependence on others, and it will require others who willingly accept the burden of caring for their elders, even at the expense of their own independence. The ownership society only makes sense if it prepares us to be care-givers and care-receivers, and if it does not encourage us to see ourselves as unencumbered individuals.
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I had a similar experience when I started working in Sun City, AZ, running the food service for a high-end retirement community. My boyhood was spent in small-town Montana, where old people were respected and respectable. Very different from the entitled and self-centered folks I met in droves in Sun City. I think maybe it had to do with these people divorcing themselves from a sense of place to chase the lavishly advertised dream of Golden Years in the Arizona desert. Our church choir sang one Sunday at a Sun City parish; beautiful facility, gorgeous landscaping and a bulletin board filled with funeral notices, with no baptisms, no births and no marriages. The place was simultaneously lovely and rich and grim and sad. This Boomer intends to live out my life while living it, complete with noisy neighbors and barking dogs and babies coming into the world. Ain't none of that in Sun City.>
I'll just add that the reason most of the elderly you met (in fact, I'll bet most of the people you met) in South Florida were so rude, so unlike the rest of the South, is because the bulk of the retiree population is from northern cities like New York. In fact, we used to call Miami "New York South." (I grew up in Miami and lived there until 1999.) Miami has a reputation as one of the rudest cities in the US. When I visited New York a few years ago, I was surprised at how polite the people I encountered were. They were in a hurry, that's true, but you didn't get the feeling that they actively hated you for impinging upon their day with your petty needs. My friends and I developed the theory that New York and other environs were exporting all their extra-rude people to Florida.>
I think that the increasing mobility of our society, combined with the increasing tendency of the well elderly to congregate in places like Sun City and the concomitant tendency to put the unwell elderly in places like nursing homes, has caused the generations to become estranged from one another. A few generations ago it would not be uncommon to have members of three generations -- parents, children, and a grandparent or two -- living together under one roof. Children and middle-aged people had frequent contact with older people, and older people had frequent contact with children. They might have resented one another at times, but they learned how to live and deal with people of different generations.
Now that many older people are able to afford to keep living in their home after their children move out -- and often move away, usually for job-related reasons -- many older people associate only with others like themselves, and many children grow up without have grandparents who are an active, frequent presence in their lives -- which is ironic, since increasing longevity has meant that there are more older people around than there used to be. Add to that the increasing numbers of childless couples (discussed to death on another thread), and you have increasing numbers of people who are used to associating only with members of their own generation. I don't think this is a healthy thing, either for families or for society, since the survival of a society depends, to a large degree, on the passing down of traditions (even if it is only a tradition of mutual civility) from one generation to another.>
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