Who Cares for the Elderly?

entailed a kind of abandonment of the aged. It meant leaving the old country, the land of one's forebears, for a strange land, often without the comfort of one's mother tongue-all for the sake of the young. Immigrants made an extraordinary sacrifice and placed an extraordinary pressure on their sons and daughters. In Great Britain, W.H. Auden once said, children feel pressure to live up to their parents; but in America, until the 1950s, parents expected their children to outstrip them. This compulsion to surpass one's parents meant in turn that an immigrant people became a perpetually migrant people. Children left home for college-their first step into the middle class-in quest of better jobs than their fathers' and better homes and kitchens than their mothers', and eventually spilled out of the cities into the suburbs and across the land, hoping to improve their lot. They left their elders behind or saw them off to those huge territorial nursing homes, Florida and Arizona. Americans, furthermore, are a pragmatic and a functional people. They tend to identify with doing rather than being. When retirement strips them of their work, people lose their self-respect and therefore their hold on the respect of others. The aged slip to the margins of consciousness for the ruling generation. In this regard, America is the most secular of countries-not in the moder meaning of secular as irreligious but in its original characterization of a culture that orients itself to the current generation, the generation that holds power and exercises authority. That may be closer to the root of things than the conventional characterization of America as a youth culture. A consumer society is secular in that it orients with a vengeance to the current generation. It squanders the resources of generations to come and it distances itself from generations past. In abortion, it deals expediently with the unwanted young; and, in the nursing home, somewhat marginally, with the unwanted old, all of this mostly for the sake of the generation now in charge. But the neglect to which secularism leads does not tell the whole story. To the degree that the aged increase in numbers they become an active threat to the ruling generation. The elderly have become a political power bloc; they have already influenced legislation and court decisions; they have regained the right to work beyond sixty-five and therefore their identity through doing; and they have protected (through Medicare, Medicaid, and cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security payments) their identity through their holdings. The elderly currently get 150 billion dollars out of the annual federal budget and by the year 2040, it has been predicted,' some 20 percent of the total population will be elderly and some 40 percent of the federal budget, at I~~ ~~~ ~~~~~ _ r. __ .--r _ I I ._ _ .._1g. I_