Aging Boomers, Health Reform and the End of Sex
http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=dee6428b511da795bdb900d684bb1cc2
'Counter Culture' Author Dubs New 'Elder Culture'
Paul Kleyman
Sep 14, 2009
Editor's Note: In 1969, Theodore Roszak helped define the boomer
generation with his groundbreaking book, "The Making of a Counter
Culture." Now, four decades later, the 75-year-old social historian
sees Woodstock Nation coming full circle in his 20th book, "The
Making of an Elder Culture" (New Society Publishers, 2009). As the
boomers -- 78 million-strong -- march past age 60, says Roszak, they
bear the heirloom seeds of "what I call the counter culture, the
willingness to question rather deeply the cultural standards of the society."
NAM editor Paul Kleyman interviewed Roszak at his home in Berkeley,
Calif. Roszak described growing up Catholic in an insular white
neighborhood of Chicago and how his students awakened him in the
1960s to new ways of seeing the world. He examined such topics as
multiculturalism, the coming caregiver rebellion by boomer women, and
what he means by "the end of sex."
--
It's been a decade since you published 'America the Wise' and its
paperback edition, 'Longevity Revolution.' Why did you decide to
revisit the issues of our aging society?
The book is almost an appeal to the boomer generation to wake up to
the power that it possesses and the responsibility that comes with
that power. This is the generation that established the cult of
youth. But they're going to be older for a much longer time than they
were ever young.
The question this book asks is: How will aging change the American
population, especially the generation of the '60s, which is
overwhelmed with associations of youth and activism?
What's different about the way boomers will experience old age?
Every generation has its own characteristics, depending on what it
lived through. One characteristic of the boomers is that as young
people, they were willing to flirt with divergent ideas. That's what
I call the counterculture, the willingness to question rather deeply
the cultural standards of society.
That's something that went beyond politics. But what about issues
such as what a family should be like? What are you living for, more
and more money and acquisition? What should a good education be like?
What should the relations of men and women be like? That's probably
what made them most annoying, raising issues about very deep social
mores, customs, traditions.
This generation also had the experience of multiculturalism, which
was very rarely part of the politics of the past, the idea of opening
up society to as much cultural diversity as possible. That became a
value, and a very controversial one.
You mention multiculturalism, but not all boomers were part of
Woodstock Nation. How do you see the racial divide playing out in
terms of America's increasingly diverse older population?
What's the phrase now? We're going to have a 'minority-majority.' I
grew up in a working poor family in Chicago. You just didn't see
different kinds of people. The only black people you saw were if you
went downtown, they carried your luggage at the railway station.
There was little diversity in most Chicago neighborhoods. In fact,
the boundaries were often guarded by violence.
So, for me, it's really remarkable to see how this society has opened
up to cultural diversity. Things that were once considered
explosively controversial like jazz, music that was not Bing Crosby
are now taken for granted. I think the boomer generation introduced that.
I remember when students protested that, 'What we're reading are 40
great books by 40 great white guys.' I had to admit, that's true.
These are called 'the classics.' What they wanted were a lot of
different views of life -- Native American, African American, more
gender diversity and more women represented in the curriculum. I was
a young instructor at the time, and I found that exciting.
How do you see the racial divide playing out in our aging America?
This is one of the things that makes the health care issue so very
important. You don't want just a lot of older people; you want a lot
of older healthy people. If the health care system isn't reaching
elements of the population because of money, that's got to change.
Demographic ideas of the 1950s that as long as you've got a bunch of
healthy, white middle-class families, you're okay are not going to
work anymore. You've got to spread health around. That's one of the
reasons I'm hoping President Obama's going to come through with
something that may stick in the craw of the conservatives, which the
nation needs desperately.
Will America be able to afford it?
It's been striking to me that the first thing you always hear when
you bring up even modest health care reform is, 'How can we afford that?'
One of the major insights of the boomer generation, back when they
were young, was from all the writing by people who said, 'This is a
very rich society. Therefore, we should be able to provide a
guaranteed annual income for everybody.' If you go back, you'll find
even archconservatives like [University of Chicago economist] Milton
Friedman saying, 'Why have all these social programs? Why don't we
just mail people money, a negative income tax? If you didn't make
enough money to come up to a certain level, the IRS will send you a
check.' There was no question in his mind that we were rich enough to
afford these things.
One of the things that has been subject to social amnesia since about
the 1970s is how basically rich this society is. I think there's been
a deliberate attempt by corporate and conservative elements to bury
that fact, so that people will think we're poor, we can't afford
anything, we can't afford music programs in the schools. We can't
afford schools. We're very, very poor. This is not true; industrial
societies are very, very rich. And they can afford a certain level of
basic necessity, which should be available to everybody as a matter
of right.
What about the recession?
You know, this whole economic crisis is a kind of perverse measure of
how rich we are. It's been filled with abuse and scamming and
banditry. What we're going through is not like the sort of economic
crisis people in Somalia might go through. They are authentically poor.
One of my appeals in the book is that boomers should revive that
discussion, when we thought we could provide a decent standard of
living and health for everybody.
Part of health care reform not being discussed is the lack of
long-term care and help for family caregivers. Will that remain on
the back burner as a major expense families will just have to
continue bearing themselves?
One thing I think is going to have to change is our perception of
caregiving along the entire spectrum, from terminally ill people to
reasonably healthy elders, who are frail and need assisted living.
Instead of regarding this as a liability, I think we should see this
as one of the frontiers of employment and investment.
In the future, our economy is going to be a health care economy.
Instead of treating those services as something menial, we should
treat them as something respectful and professional, so that it will
be well done and be well paid for. We tend to think of a lot of
nursing assistants as very low level. But that's got to change, and I
think it will as more demand for that kind of help emerges.
Emerge how?
We're going to see in the next 10 years a rebellion on the part of
women in their 50s, who are getting stuck with eldercare for no
money. They have to cut off their careers and stop being what they
wanted to be to stay home and become caregivers. And it's very hard
to be a caregiver these days; it's not like Victorian times, when
you'd make a cup of tea for Grandmother and put her by the fire. Now
you've got to have a lot of medical skills to do effective eldercare.
At some point, we're going to get a rebellion that says, 'Look, our
parents deserve better than what we can give them at home as
amateurs.' There's going to be a big push for spending a lot of money
on long-term care.
Long-term care is like a ticking time bomb. An awful lot of American
families are being asked, in effect, to carry the full burden of
longevity. And that's not fair.
Aging boomers are often depicted as holding onto the sex, drugs and
rock-and-roll of their youth. How do you see elders evolving?
There's a chapter in the book called 'The End of Sex,' where I use
'end,' not as a finish, but as an objective, the goal. I think we're
going to see relationships shift markedly, radically, among couples,
as aging begins to become more characteristic of our lives. Loyalty
and caring are going to become the more dominant theme of
relationships. As nature runs its course, couples will begin to
realize that there comes a time when the physical condition of your
spouse becomes a dominant theme in your life, and your condition
becomes a dominant theme in your spouse's life.
What about drugs?
In the book what I suggest is that the most effective way of
transforming consciousness dramatically and significantly in an
enduring way is organically, without any chemical additives. Nothing
changes consciousness more than aging.
Consciousness transformation was such a dominant theme of the
counterculture of the '60s. In an elder culture, though, it's going
to become the transformation of simply maturing, getting older and
seeing life from a very different perspective. It makes a lot of
difference, if you think you have 50 years ahead of you or 10 years
ahead in life.
.
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