Tonight, the PBS documentary series, POV, broadcasts the story of these elder men and women in an episode titled, “The Way We Get By,” about the volunteers who greet every soldier traveling through Bangor on their way to and from the United States. As the program's website notes, the film

“...takes a look behind the hearty smiles, handshakes, heartfelt thanks and free cookies and cell phones the greeters bring to the airport, and discovers a world in which the seniors are engaged in their own struggles with aging, disease, loneliness, memories of war and personal loss.

“The film discovers a remarkable symbiosis between the soldiers' fighting mission and the greeters' fight to overcome pain, fatigue and depression in making sure no soldier departs or returns without thanks.”

”The Way We Get By” concentrates on three of the “troop greeters” - 87-year-old Bill Knight who served in World War II; 76-year-old Joan Gaudet who has a grandson and granddaughter readying to serve in Iraq; and 74-year-old Jerry Mundy who lost a son at an early age. Here is the trailer:

Find out more about the elder troop greeters and the film here, and you can check here for broadcast times on your PBS station. Beginning tomorrow, 12 November, the program will available for viewing online for one month.

As we have discussed here in the past, more than a third of people 65 and older take a fall each year and one in ten of those breaks a bone. Twenty percent of elders who suffer a hip fracture die within a year.

To some degree, we can “fall-proof” our homes through such means as removing throw rugs, installing grab bars in the bathroom, keeping clutter off the floors, improving lighting, etc. and now science is coming to the rescue with some inexpensive digital tools to monitor elders at home and provide personally-tailored fall prevention measures.

According to a story in the Sunday New York Times,

“For an older person, a fall is often a byproduct of some other health problem: cardiovascular weakness, changes in medication, the beginnings of dementia, gradual muscle degeneration. Motion analysis aided by inexpensive sensors and computing, researchers say, may well become a new 'vital sign,' like a blood pressure reading, that can yield all sorts of clues about health.”

One study using these methods has reduced falls by 30 percent and researchers believe that can be increased to 50 or 60 percent. There is much more to this and it's fascinating. Read more here.

Yesterday, in his Reflections column, Saul Friedman mentioned what fun it is to watch Jon Stewart on The Daily Show take down members of Congress for their idiocies.

Stewart and his team often succeed magnificently and sometimes they are only mediocre. That's forgivable; no one can turn out that much comedy and satire four days a week and hit the jackpot every time although Stewart and company come close. And occasionally, they turn out something that deserves to be enshrined in a comedy hall of fame (if there isn't such a thing, there ought to be).

There was such a moment last week. In a solo impression of the Republicans' latest superstar crazed buffoon, Stewart is so dead-on and so funny that, as someone noted online, he should win an Emmy for this single performance alone. I've watched it every day since it was broadcast and am still blown away each time.

Savor this Jon Stewart take on Glenn Beck. It is one of the most brilliant impressions ever created.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The 11/3 Project
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Claire Jean: Remembering

It’s great sport to watch The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert eviscerate members of Congress with video clips of their latest bits of idiocy. It serves to demonstrate the truth of Mark Twain’s comment: “Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Yet here’s a political puzzle that’s baffled me for years: The Congress, as a body of 535 or so men and women, almost always gets the lowest approval ratings of any Washington institution, lower even than the press. And some of the members, especially nowadays, are truly buffoons who, in the words of a former house speaker, never open their mouths but that they detract from the sum of human knowledge.

Nevertheless, most of the members, including the nuts, are re-elected every two or six years by constituents who then join in the chorus of derision for the congress. The simple explanation, of course, is that it’s easy to ridicule an amorphous body, but congressional politics is local and utilitarian, as the founders planned, and even the buffoons have aides who can solve a Social Security problem and Kiwanians who will support any warm body who wears a flag pin.

But I have digressed from my mission here, which is to tell you that there is something more profound at work when members of Congress, who should know better, act, speak and vote like fools. How else to explain Senator Charles Grassley, a veteran Iowa Republican who ran the committee on aging, actually saying, if not believing, that the health insurance reforms considered by the Senate Finance Committee, on which he’s the ranking member, would encourage the deaths of older insured people on Medicare?

What I have observed in 50 years of covering politics and the Congress is that members like Grassley, after many years in public life, often become removed from the realities of daily life. They’ll simply lose touch and their interests (like party loyalty and ideology) become increasingly irrelevant for the everyday lives of people they are supposed to represent.

I remember when I first realized this – without understanding it. It was during one the interviews I did when, for a time in my Houston tenure, I was assigned to cover luncheons and the like and write features about interesting visitors.

My technique was to ask my subject something out of left field. So I learned that then opera star Roberta Peters was a baseball fan and once sang the latest World Series score to her tenor. And I found that Socialist leader Norman Thomas had a great sense of humor.

The subject who confounded me a bit was one of my political heroes, Senator J. William Fulbright, the suave and liberal Arkansas Democrat, then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Instead of talking foreign policy with him, I asked him a very pedestrian question which I no longer remember. All that I recall is that the technique didn’t work; Fulbright, a former college president, did not know what I was talking about. It was simply not part of his reality.

That was understandable. Like others in his station, he did not drive his own car, go to the cleaners, buy groceries, pay for the lunch or even type his speech. Others were paid to do things like that.

I remember participating in long lunch and bull session in Des Moines in 1980, with a gang of reporters and Senator Ted Kennedy. The long-suffering and hard-working waitress was stunned when Kennedy left without paying or tipping her. The explanation: He didn’t realize he had to; besides, he never carried money because he didn’t need it. His aides and the reporters paid. And someone (not me) wrote a nasty story about how Teddy nearly stiffed the waitress.

But even the privileged and protected have the capacity to learn, perhaps from personal tragedy and human encounters. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s struggle with polio and his months with plain folk at Warm Springs were reflected in his New Deal liberalism and passion for social justice. The murders of Kennedy’s brothers which left Ted the head and caretaker of the clan, and the serious illnesses of his two sons, gave him his liberal social conscience and determination to provide for all Americans the health insurance he had.

Former Senate Republican leader Bill Frist, a heart surgeon and a bona fide conservative whose family corporation (Columbia HCA) ripped off Medicare for billions of dollars, now supports health care reform he would have opposed when he was in Congress. He had traveled the world seeing the need for health care in Africa, which he writes about in his new book, A Heart to Serve – The Passion to Bring Health, Hope and Healing. And he ridicules as nonsense the opposition statements of Grassley and company.

Frist had been freed from the narrow personal and financial interests that prevent legislators from looking around at the real world, learning new things and, God forbid, changing their views. If you watched the performance of the Senate Finance Committee, for example, you would have seen well-paid aides hovering over their senators telling them what’s going on and what positions they ought to take. (Some aides has worked for insurance and drug companies).

The Washington Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia, who wrote October 1 of the “whispering brigade” of aides at the committee’s sessions, caught one of them speaking quietly to Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, which is not of the real world for most of us, “mouthing lines in Baucus’ ear almost Cyrano de Bergerac-style.”

I’m told that Senator Olympia (Hamlet) Snowe, of Maine, had to be instructed from time to time on how Medicare works. She was not alone in her ignorance. She opposed any “public option” among the choices in health care, she said, although she was not clear why because most of her older constituents have Medicare, which is a public option and most of the rest of the people in Maine appear to want the same.

Democratic Senator Evan Bayh, of Indiana, and independent Joe Lieberman, threatened to block or vote against health reform with a public option and almost no one in the press, save blogger Glenn Greenwald, noted their close ties to and the money they and their spouses get from the insurance and drug industries.

Indeed, much of the press. From the beginning, has aided and abetted efforts to kill a strong, health care bill that could lead to universal insurance.

As I’ve written elsewhere, despite appeals from some of the best experts in medicine and health care, much of the main stream press ignored and helped to toss off the table of consideration, Medicare for All. Then, as Chris Weigant wrote in Huffington Post on October 27, virtually every reporter and commentator pronounced the so-called “public option” dead. And they seem to applaud the members who confirmed their assumption, but they didn’t challenge them, or suggest that maybe the public option may be a good thing.

And despite its growing popularity, the public option was dismissed as supported by “liberals.” Why? Because too much of the press no longer pursues that which is outside their own narrow and conventional interests and career ambitions. Once journalism was a calling to right wrongs; now (except for some fine blogs like this one) it’s a career without values.

That’s a far cry from the kind of aggressive, participatory journalism practiced before 24-hour cable-infotainment. My colleagues and I challenged and argued with lawmakers who seem divorced from reality. We even fed them questions to be asked of witnesses, the better to get a good story.

With the help of a few reporters, including me, Ralph Nader began the consumer movement. One of the finest investigative reporters I knew worked closely with a member of Congress to root out union corruption. My needling questions and stories helped bring a senator I covered over to oppose the Vietnam War.

Now, however, almost no one (except perhaps Rachel Maddow and a few bloggers) pokes at the hypocrisy of, say, Senator John McCain who will vote to kill the health reform although he has been on the public payroll for all his life and never had to pay a medical bill.

How about that buffoon who proposed that all members of Congress be forced to sign up for the health reform? Doesn’t he know that that’s what he and his well-paid colleagues already have in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan and for only $503 a year? But I’ll bet that many don’t pay their own bills. Does anyone call them out on their hypocrisy besides Stewart and Colbert?

I miss being in the trenches covering these lawmakers many, if not most, of whom are valiant and tireless public servants. But, like Representatives John Dingell and John Conyers, both of Michigan, the two longest-serving members of the House, the really good ones don’t often get press because they are not buffoons.

I covered them both and had my difference with Dingell over his overt legislative support for the National Rifle Association. But Dingell, whose father was a New Dealer who helped give us our modern labor laws, and Conyers, who once worked as an aide to the younger Dingell, have for years championed universal national health insurance, which most Americans say they want.

Truth be told, I think even most members of Congress, would agree. But they are dismissed by other lawmakers and the press who ignore the real world of what is needed in favor of the narrow, conventional wisdom which as usual, is not very wise.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Nancy Leitz: The Theological Discussion

Now the Senate needs to produce a merged bill to vote on and then another round of merging the House and Senate bills before another vote.

It is a discouraging process to watch. If you tune in to any congressional debate, you know what an embarrassment many of our lawmakers are. This time, several shouted "Objection" again and again interrupting normal procedural statements from other members and continued to do so after being called out of order. Let's send them all back to kindergarten.

It was an historic day in that in decades of trying, health care reform has never gotten this far before, but it was at the expense of women. The Stupak amendment, adopted in a 240-194 vote, extends to the public option in the bill the long-established prohibition against using federal funds (allocated through Health and Human Services) for abortion procedures. It also restricts use of federal affordability funds to purchase policies on the exchanges that include abortion coverage. Read more here.

We can only hope that the Senate has a better handle on Roe v. Wade and that a woman's right to choose will prevail, but don't count on it. Last week, I was surprised, shocked even, to discover that two of the three bills that will be merged into one in the Senate would raise faith healing to the level of clinical medicine.

The provision would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual health care” and would require insurers to consider covering such non-medical procedures as prayer treatments such as those used in the Christian Science Church.

This is not a new idea. Three years ago, when the state of Massachusetts instituted statewide universal health care, the Christian Science Church successfully lobbied for a provision that allows people to opt out of the mandated coverage for religious reasons. Soon thereafter, the church was again successful in securing reimbursement through taxpayer dollars for faith healing treatments.

To her credit, House Leader Nancy Pelosi stripped similar provisions from the House reform bill after several representatives objected on grounds of separation of church and state. That alone should put an end to such nonsense as government funded prayer treatment but Phil Davis, described in the Los Angeles Times as a senior official of the Christian Science Church, says prayer is an “effective alternative to conventional healthcare.”

“'We are making the case for this, believing there is a connection between healthcare and spirituality,' said Davis, who distributed 11,000 letters last week to Senate officials urging support for the measure.

"'We think this is an important aspect of the solution, when you are talking about not only keeping the cost down, but finding effective healthcare,' he said.”

Well, we can agree on the cost part. For those as ignorant as I was about Christian Science, apparently, “trained prayer practitioners” are paid $20 to $40 a day by patients to pray for them and the Church's newsletter regularly publishes testimonials from those who say prayer cured their prostate cancer, breast lumps and assorted other serious conditions.

To my further surprise, there is additional precedent for government sanction of prayer as medical treatment. According to the same Los Angeles Times story:

”The Internal Revenue Service allows the cost of the prayer sessions to be counted among itemized medical expenses for income tax purposes - one of the only (sic) religious treatments explicitly identified as deductible by the IRS. Some federal medical insurance programs, including those for military families, also reimburse for prayer treatment.”

In other words, you and I and all taxpayers are being forced to make donations with our tax dollars to support religious organizations with which we have no affiliation to practice woo-woo medicine.

People should do all the praying they want, but not paid for with federal money. If this provision is allowed to stand in the health care reform bill that eventually emerges from Congress, what can stop anyone from declaring their religious practice to be on a par with science-based health care and demanding reimbursement?

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Jeanne Waite Follett: Old Letters, Old Friends

I had so much fun doing the Route 66 post a few weeks ago in which I allowed the lyrics of one song about a journey to suggest other songs, I thought I’d do another song. There are several that could be used but the first one that came to mind is Promised Land.

Chuck Berry performing, of course.

Promised Land

I left my home in Norfolk, Virginia,
California on my mind.
Straddled that greyhound, rode him past Raleigh, On across Caroline.

This is Norfolk Virginia (sort of).

I couldn’t find any songs about that city, I’m sure any readers from there will come up with them and let me know. Nor any about Raleigh:

However, as Chuck seems to be dreaming about California, there’s an obvious one right away: The Mamas and the Papas' California Dreamin'.

Click to play: California Dreamin'

Stopped in Charlotte and bypassed Rock Hill,
And we never was a minute late.
We was ninety miles out of Atlanta by sundown,
Rollin’ cross the Georgia state.

I bypassed both Charlotte (below) and Rock Hill (under Charlotte) and rolled straight into Georgia with the Atlanta Rhythm Section performing Georgia Rhythm.

Click to play: Atlanta Rhythm Section - Georgia Rhythm

We had motor trouble it turned into a struggle,
Half way cross Alabam,
And that hound broke down and left us all stranded
In downtown Birmingham.

Here is Birmingham.

The mention of Alabam leads me directly to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama.

Click to play: Lynyrd Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama

Straight off, I bought me a through train ticket,
Ridin’ cross Mississippi clean
And I was on that midnight flyer out of Birmingham
Smoking into New Orleans.

Ah, New Orleans, an embarrassment of song riches, which of the thousands do I select? The obvious one is Walkin’ to New Orleans, although, in the song, Chuck is taking the train. Doesn’t matter.

Here’s Fats Domino.

Somebody help me get out of Louisiana
Just help me get to Houston town.
There’s people there who care a little bout me
And they wont let the poor boy down.

I immediately though of Rodney Crowell’s album, “The Houston Kid,” and the song from that called The Rock of My Soul. This is a dark song and not easy listening, but it’s a fine song from a great album.

Click to play: Rodney Crowell - The Rock of My Soul

Sure as you’re born, they bought me a silk suit,
Put luggage in my hands, And I woke up high over Albuquerque
On a jet to the promised land.

There are several songs with Albuquerque in their title, most notably one by Neil Young, but I’m not too keen on these, so I’ve decided to go with the most famous song that mentions the city and that is By the Time I Get to Phoenix, the Jimmy Webb version (well, he wrote it, that’s good enough for me).

Click to play: Jimmy Webb - By the Time I Get to Phoenix

Workin’ on a T-bone steak a la carte
Flying over to the golden state;
The pilot told me in thirteen minutes
We’d be headin’ in the terminal gate.

Swing low sweet chariot, come down easy
Taxi to the terminal zone;
Cut your engines, cool your wings,
And let me make it to the telephone.

Los Angeles give me Norfolk Virginia,
Tidewater four ten o nine
Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin’
And the poor boys on the line

I really don’t think that the poor boy on the line is Elvis but it’ll do for me. Here’s Elvis performing Poor Boy.

Click to play: Elvis - Poor Boy

If you have a friend or a loved one in a nursing home, with the holidays coming on, this would be a good time to check closely on conditions in the home and the quality of his or her care. For this economic downturn and Medicaid reductions in some states may be affecting the level of care, especially in for-profit homes that may cut corners to save money.

I say “may’ because some nursing homes are warning of staff layoffs and even closures, but there is little real evidence that residents are being affected. But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently updated its lists of so-called Special Focus Facilities (SFFs), which include scores of homes that have a history of serious problems such as the conditions and staffing of the institution and the level of care.

In August, the Government Accountability Office surveyed the ten-year-old SFF program and estimated that 580 of the 16,000 nursing homes in the country “could be considered the most poorly performing.” In addition, CMS lists dozens of other homes on the SFF lists – at least one in every state - have not shown substantial improvement in the past year or so.

CMS, which uses state agencies to monitor the homes, separates the SFFs into five categories:

• homes recently added to the list that need improvement


• those that have improved


• those that have not improved


• those that have improved enough to be removed from the list


• those that are so poor they have lost Medicare and Medicaid participation

You may check out the list of homes considered SFFs for your state here [pdf].

Also, last December CMS began a five star rating system for the nation’s nursing homes. This compares the level and quality of care for facilities by area.

The concern about the recession’s effect on nursing home care was touched off, in part, by a widely circulated wire story last month in which an official of the American Health Care Association saw the possibility of layoffs in nursing homes. The story said the nursing home industry was in crisis, partly because “Congress is debating slashing billions more in Medicare funding a part of health care reform.”

But there are a number of pending proposals to strengthen long term care. And while Medicaid funds have been cut in many states and Medicare is cutting some direct payments to nursing homes over the next decade, the GAO and the official Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPac) say the nursing homes have enjoyed billions in overpayments, especially for skilled nursing facilities, where patients who are supposed to get one-on-one therapy are among three or more getting treated at the same time.

With aides paid too little (less than $10 an hour) to attend to too many residents, MedPac found that nursing homes profits exceeded 10 percent for seven consecutive years. And the profit margin for nursing homes in 2007 was 14.5 percent.

The GAO noted, incidentally, that “the most poorly performing homes tended to be chain affiliated and for-profit and have more beds and residents.”

Richard Mollot, executive director of the New York-based Long Term Care Community Coalition, a watchdog group, told me that while it would be wise to keep a special eye out on the care given to loved ones:

“Providers are always crying that they don’t have enough money...basically there have been cutbacks to the raises facilities were expecting.”

And he noted that inflation has been minimal. He cautioned against buying into the predictions that cutbacks are necessary and cited the wire story‘s report on layoffs at three homes in Brooklyn in the Metropolitan Jewish Health System. In 2004, The New York Times, discussing the poorly paid aides, reported that the head of the system, Eli Feldman, earned over $1 million in salary.

Whatever the finances of the nursing home industry, the Obama administration, elected a year ago this week, has encouraged the Democratic Congress to propose a host of bills to fix problems large and small with long term care. One bill, for example, would make it easier for families to file complaints on behalf of patients and open the books on who actually owns, runs and profits from the homes. Another bill would strengthen programs to prevent patient abuse.

The most important proposal is part of the Senate Health Committee’s bill for health care reform. Introduced by the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, it’s called the Community Living Assistance Service and Support Act, or CLASS.

Among other things, it would enroll workers over 18 to gradually build a long term care fund financed by a payroll tax. They could opt out, but the fund would in five years finance the long term care of enrolled workers who need help. The initial benefit, about $100 a day, for home or nursing home care, is small, but it would relieve some pressure on Medicaid, and supporters see this as a start to solve what AARP has called “the greatest unmet health need,” the lack of public long term nursing care.

The bill is also included in the House version of health care reform and is expected to survive after it is combined with the more conservative one from the Senate Finance Committee. But not surprisingly, it’s opposed by the American Association of Long Term Care Insurance which fears it will put private insurers out of business. That would not be a bad idea, but we can talk about the worth of long term care insurance at another time.

Need help? You may reach me at saulfriedmanATcomcastDOTnet

Today I am pleased to announce there will be more of Saul's work in a regular Saturday column titled Gray Matters which, until a week ago, had appeared in the Long Island paper, Newsday, for the past 12 years.

Saul made news early this week announcing that he had severed his relationship with Newsday when Cablevision, which owns the paper, placed the online edition behind a paid firewall allowing free access only to people who subscribe to the print edition or to Cablevision. Others pay $5 a week.

The policy shift meant that not only would Saul's many readers throughout the country lose access to his popular column, even he, living near Washington, D.C. and not a Cablevision subscriber, would be locked out.

In an email, Saul explained further:

“About a dozen years ago, when my aging legs were giving out after more than 40 years of covering cops and crooks, presidents and wars, I founded what has become a unique enterprise, a column that serves as a survival guide for those of us of a certain age.

“I called it Gray Matters, which is a deliberate triple entendre. (You figure it out). It was and is still the only column of its kind, for it sought to explain, report on and probe the nitty gritty of virtually every issue confronting people over 50 - and their care givers. And it was designed to provide help in negotiating the thickets of Medicare, Medicaid, Long Term Care, IRAs, Social Security.

“I have been an unabashed, unapologetic advocate for America’s still inadequate Social Insurance programs. I’ve used my sources to get help for readers. And from time to time I’ve dispensed advice, always based on expertise. But because aging is not just about Medicare and Medicaid, as Time Goes By has demonstrated, no subject is out of bounds.

“The column has been published in Newsday, for which I had worked as a reporter for a dozen years before I took a buyout. And Newsday has generously supported the column since 1997. But alas, like so much of the newspaper business, Newsday has undergone changes, for better or worse.

“As a result, Gray Matters is moving to Time Goes By and will appear each Saturday, supplementing with some timely reporting the wit and wisdom of its writers. In addition, because it will give me a chance to search my mind and memory for the lessons I’ve learned in a most exciting, action-packed half-century of journalism, I shall continue to contribute my Reflections.”

What Saul did not mention is that during those 40 years of "covering cops and crooks, presidents and war," he received a Pulitzer Prize for his part in coverage of the 1967 Detroit riots, is a Nieman Fellow and has the distinction of being among the journalists and others targeted by the White House on Richard Nixon's infamous Enemies List. (For some of us of a certain era, that may be his most distinguished award.)

I'm pretty sure there is nothing around that could be a better fit with the goals of Time Goes By than Saul's Gray Matters column and I am proud to host it here. Be sure to stop by for his first column tomorrow and each Saturday thereafter.

Vintage TGB, which Gray Matters replaces, will appear occasionally in the future on weekdays.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Ann Berger: Sharing My Birthday Pony

The health care reform drum beat in Congress moves forward at the pace and feel of a dirge. Now Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid says there may not be a vote on the Senate bill until 2010. House Leader Nancy Pelosi expects a vote on the merged House bill this week or next weekend or sometime, depending the source you read. But until the Senate votes, there can be no work on a final bill for the entire Congress.

As the bills now stand, here are some key points from one or another or both. None of this is guaranteed as there is no way to tell what the final bill will contain:

In the Senate version, the public option would apply only to people whose employers do not provide coverage and who cannot buy private coverage for whatever reason. States would be allowed to opt out of the public option.

In the House version, according to reports prior to the vote, the public option is stronger and does not allow states to opt out. It also forbids the federal government from bailing out the private option.

That last item represents doom for any public option because in either the House or Senate version, the pool of public option participants too small to successfully spread the risk. Is it possible that among all 535 members of Congress, their thousands of aides and me, I am the only one who has noticed that failure of the public option is built in? Or am I naïve to think it isn't being planned that way?

There had been a provision in the House bill that would allow individual states to create single-payer systems if they chose to, but it was stripped out.

The House bill expands Medicaid to more people, and provides for a 5.4 percent income tax surcharge for singles earning $500,000 or more and couples earning $1 million and above to help pay for the bill.

The House bill also provides more generous subsidies to families buying coverage from exchanges and – good news for elders - it lowers the cost of prescription drugs for Medicare beneficiaries by authorizing CMS to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. The Senate bill only reduces the doughnut hole a bit.

There are hints this week that the execrable trigger option, the brainchild of Maine Senator Olympia Snowe may be back on the table. If it is passed in place of any version of a public option, a public option will never go into effect.

These items don't begin to explain the bills in any detail which, anyway, seems a waste of good brain cells to try to do since there is no way to know what the final bill from the two houses of Congress will contain.

What is evident overall, as we have discussed, is that aside from preventing private insurers from rejecting insurance applicants for most pre-existing conditions, the bills generously preserve the status quo for private insurers, even guaranteeing tens of millions of new customers, in one of the bills, by mandating purchase of insurance and limiting the number of people eligible for a public option.

That's what millions of lobbying dollars buys; billions for private companies and minimal help for everyone else.

Having spent the entire summer deeply embedded in following the progress of health care reform, I am terribly disappointed in what we now have before us. The only thing that could improve my mood about health care reform would be a knight in shining armor riding in with a single-payer system and magically persuading Congress and the president to see the light.

However, since that will not happen...

There is no choice but to support what we've got. If some kind of health care reform is not passed by this 111th Congress, there won't be another chance for 15 or 20 years. And in the interim, health care costs will skyrocket leaving millions more than now unable to afford coverage or treatment.

It is better to pass even as weak a bill as we will apparently get and have something to work with – to amend, tweak, change and fix (even the best bill would need some of that) – than to face the collapse of Medicare in a few years and perhaps the entire health care system.

What worries me most about Senator Reid's retreat on a Senate vote before early 2010 (remember that the Senate already missed a promised August vote) is that the mid-term election campaign will be gearing up and senators facing voters next year will be a volatile bunch as they try to please all the people in their states all the time.

So keep writing and calling your representatives in Congress. Tell them what parts of the bills you like and what you don't like. Let them know that their vote will affect your vote in the mid-term election next year.

The PBS series Life (Part 2), hosted by my friend Bob Lipstyte, is continuing on television and online. This week it's about dating - the second time around. Here's a clip:

You can watch the full episode here.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Johna Ferguson: Looking Backwards

Most surprising to me are untold numbers of people who call themselves “happiness coaches.” Go ahead, google “happiness coach” and see how many returns you get. Never mind – it's nearly 35,000, almost all of whom are selling books and expensive seminars mostly about how to become a happiness coach.

French president Nicholas Sarkozy wants to replace the traditional GDP as a measure of a country's economic health with a happiness GDP. Talk about squishy statistics.

One happiness study reports that to be happy, you need friends who are happy. In fact, according to the year-old study, if the friend of a happy friend of yours is happy, your chances of being happy increase not by five percent, nor 10 percent, but by precisely six percent. Uh-huh.

Last month, they told us that women aren't as happy as they were 40 years ago and in fact, men are happier than women. This is being called the “happiness gap” and no doubt someone somewhere takes this stuff seriously, blaming it on women's success in overcoming the “gender gap” that was a popular talking point in the women's movement 40 years ago.

A year ago, just a week or two before the presidential election which was looking good for Barack Obama at that moment, a Pew Charitable Trust survey found that 37 percent of Republicans were “very happy” compared to 25 percent of Democrats. Go figure.

Poor people are happier than rich people. Oh, wait. There's another study that says the opposite - that is, if happiness is measured by the amount of leisure time one has.

One survey reported that all types of parents – married, single, stepparents and even empty-nesters - are less happy than childless couples. This caused an uproar of belligerent emails from parents who disagreed.

And several surveys report that money won't make you happy. They're probably right, but it does pay the bills. Another survey says that financial security is more important than wealth in determining happiness.

Time Goes By being what it is, I'm most interested in what researchers say about happiness in old age. There was much to-do last year when a study reported that people become happier as they get older. But not so fast. Other reports say that women become less happy than men in old age or, if you that bothers you, try another study that says men become less happy after age 65. Take your pick.

In keeping with the dubious nature of all this happiness stuff, you can find a study to prove anything you want to believe about it which shouldn't be a surprise. Happiness is like a joke – try to explain it and it's ruined.

Most of these studies are done with what is called the Day Reconstruction Method. For a day, subjects keep a diary of every activity. The next day, they rate their mood and feelings about each of those activities as they were doing them, on a 12 point scale.

Some people give high unhappy numbers to such things as paying the bills, dusting and washing dishes which seem odd tasks by which to judge happiness. Dusting may be boring, but it's not important enough to cause unhappiness.

While I've been writing this, I've been trying to check my happiness meter which is difficult because I have never been able to say what makes me happy. Joy, I think, those momentary events that elate us for a short period of time, aren't related to overall happiness and well being and, in fact, can happen even during miserable times.

The reverse is also true – that terribly unhappy events take place during times of general happiness so the negative measurement of such an event hardly bears on one's overall well being.

Right now, I've just finished (I hope) a two week period in which car repairs, a broken furnace and computer problems cost me about $2,000 – a hefty sum for someone to whom a surprise $200 expense can make a serious dent in the budget. Does it make me unhappy? Not particularly. Annoyed would be a better description as it will cramp my style until it's paid off.

But I've got a secure roof over my head, enough to eat, something to do every day that I enjoy and I'm healthy. Is that happiness? I don't know. Is satisfaction, curiosity, interest in the world happiness? I don't know.

What I do know, however, is that happiness is too subjective, personal and ephemeral to be picked apart and entered into charts as all the researchers think they can do.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Lyn Burnstine: Wings

What if you are trying to attach several photos to an email or select more than one item from your hard drive? Do you have to attach the items one at a time or is there a way to select more than one file at a time?

One method of doing this is called Shift-clicking. You can select a whole batch of files that are listed side-by-side on your hard drive using Shift-Click. Select the first item, hold down the Shift key, and select the last item. Here's a video of how you do it.

Shift-clicking only works for groups of files that are next to each other in the same folder.

What if you want to select a file that is not right next to the other file or files you selected? For this you use either a Ctrl-Click (on Windows) or a Cmd-Click (on Mac). You can select two or more widely separated files within a folder using this method. Select the first one, hold down the Ctrl or Cmd key, and select the next one. Repeat, with the Ctrl/Cmd key held down, until you are finished. Here's a video of how you do it.

You may not use the same email programs I do, so you may not see exactly what the videos show, but your email program will have an attach feature somewhere. When you activate it, you will be presented with a form asking you to find the items to attach on your hard drive. Use either the Shift-Click or the Ctrl-Click/Cmd-Click method to select everything you want in one browse through a folder.

In the case of attached photos, which I used in my example, you might not want to attach more than three or so to any particular email. Photos take quite a while to download. An email with 10 or 20 huge photos attached can take a long time to download.

This method works for selecting any type of file: documents, PDF files, whatever. You can select multiple files this way to drag them to a CD to burn or to a flash drive to make a backup or even to select a set of files to delete. It's all selecting, no matter what type of file it is or what you intend to do with it.

At The Elder Storytellling Place today, Johna Ferguson: My Writing Career

Well, THAT was a surprise. On Sunday at about noon (well, not, as you will see), after having been up and about since what I thought was 4:30AM, I discovered all the clocks in the house were wrong. I hadn't noticed the time on the computer, which updates itself, so when I tuned in to one of the morning political chats on television, the program wasn't there yet.

The Daylight Savings Time change snuck up on me. It's a good thing I didn't have an appointment Sunday morning. Not so good that I woke up at what was 3:30AM. Even for me, that's an abominable time to awaken, something that probably won't change for the week or ten days it will take the cat and me to adjust our internal clocks.

The Sunday New York Times
Following a week of intense immersion in computer technology and not much else, I luxuriated Sunday in a leisurely reading of The New York Times which, aside from hard news, is filled with fascinating ephemera.

My favorite of the day relates to the running yesterday of the annual New York City Marathon. One morning last week, reports Andy Newman, he set out with his dog Barnaby to walk his own “Block-a-thon” – 26.2 miles achieved by circling his block in Park Slope, Brooklyn 76.4 times while taking notes on neighborhood activities. Barnaby dropped out at lap number 22. Andy stopped for a pedicure during lap 53.

It's a delightful read with a funny ending. Please don't cheat and read ahead. It's better if you read the whole thing.

From an Op-Ed contributor comes this startling piece of information about health insurance. Not that anyone couldn't have guessed it is so, but the high number is astonishing:

“A survey by the Commonwealth Fund found that 73 percent of the adults who tried to buy insurance on the open market over a three-year period never bought a plan — because they could not afford it, could not find a plan that met their needs, or were turned down.”

Over the past several years, as newspapers have cut staff, then cut more staff and more, I've noticed that standards are dropping everywhere, but it is particularly jarring in The New York Times. This error, that even a 6th grader should know better than, left me wondering if music section writers are given a pass on grammar:

“The move is temporary — probably — but it’s emblematic of the changes in his life in the last few years: from wild-living rock star to steady artist and mindful family man, with he and his wife, Juliet, expecting their first child.”

EARLY MORNING UPDATE
Regular readers know Saul Friedman from his twice-monthly Reflections column here and perhaps too from his weekly Gray Matters column in Newsday. This morning, The New York Times notes his departure from Newsday after 12 years and the move of his Gray Matters column to Time Goes By.

Watch for more information here on Friday and Saul's first Gray Matters column next Saturday.

OTHER MEDIA
Like me yesterday, Alan Ginocchio, who blogs at The Cyberspace Dawdler, was perusing his Sunday paper, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. He sent along this letter to the editor. I am at a loss for a comment. It is headlined, “Target Workers in Their 50s.”

Alan says he read it several times in disbelief (as I did too) and wondered if he is “suffering from a reading disorder.” If the writer, Elizabeth Newman of Fayetteville, is serious, I'm surprised it was published. If it was meant to be funny, it misses by several country miles. I don't know what to make of it. What do you think?

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Lyn Burnstine: Landscapes

Orlande de Lassus was born in what’s now Belgium. He settled in Munich and lived the rest of his life there. He married and had a couple of kids and was enormously respected by other musicians (and patrons who tried to lure him away).

There’s no scandal or any sort of naughtiness or bizarre behavior to report about him. Just his beautiful music. Vide Homo, one of his “spiritual madrigals.”

Click to play: Lassus - Vide Homo

Joseph de Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was one of the most remarkable figures of the 18th century. He was the son of a slave and rose to the top of French society through his mastery of fencing and his great facility for classical music.

He was born in Guadeloupe, the son of a wealthy Frenchman and a slave from his estate. A couple of years later, dad killed a man in a duel after a drunken argument and fled. He was later pardoned as he was a good friend of King Louis XVI. Handy being a nobleman back then (although, perhaps not so much a few years later).

The family returned to France with Joseph and his mum where young Joseph lived a privileged life on the family's plantation in Bordeaux. He went to an elite school and was gifted in pretty much everything. It seems that he excelled at whatever he turned his hand to.

He had an extraordinary life, surviving the revolution and lots of other interesting stuff. I’ve left out just about all of it; I could do a whole item just about him.

So skipping forward, he wrote string quartets, sonatas, concertos, symphonies, operas, ballets. He was often called “The Black Mozart” but has been pretty much written out of musical history. Time to revive him.

This is the first movement of his Violin Concerto No. 2, Op 5.

Click to play: St-Georges - Violin Concerto No. 2

Erik Satie didn’t like being called a musician, he preferred "phonometrician" (meaning "someone who measures sounds"). What did he do, get out his tape measure and “Ah oui, 376 centimetres of piano music, 47 centimetres of cello”?  He was a bit odd.

He certainly had a way with a title, some of which are: Genuine Flaccid Preludes (for a dog), Old Sequins and Old Breastplates, Dessicated Embryos, five pieces of Furniture Music. Hmmm.

On his death, four pianos were found in his room, two back-to-back, the others upside down on top of the first two. That’s enough weirdness for now (although there’s a lot more).

This is a solo piano piece Gnossiennes No. 1.

Click to play: Satie - Gnossiennes No. 1

Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf was Austrian but wrote music more in the Italian style. He was around when the big names of the eighteenth century were doing their stuff. He was the music teacher of Johann Baptist Vanhal, of whom I know little.

I mention it because apparently around 1774, Haydn, Dittersdorf, Mozart and Vanhal played string quartets together. That’d be called a super group these days. In case you’re interested, Haydn and Dittersdorf played the violins, Mozart the viola and Vanhal the cello.

Three days before he died, Dittersdorf finished writing his autobiography. I guess that means he didn’t have to bother with an update later.

I really like his concerto for double bass but I only have that on vinyl so it won’t be featured today. This is as far as you can get from a bass concerto; it’s the second movement of the Sinfonia No. 3 featuring a flute.

This sinfonia has the subtitle “Transformation of Actaeon into a Stag.” How could you not like that?

Click to play: Dittersdorf - Sinfonia No. 3

Scott Joplin could have been a contender but he was born the wrong color at the wrong time in the wrong place.

He was really proficient at the piano at a young age and could improvise amazingly. Fortunately, he was noticed when he was 11 years old by a German immigrant music teacher, Julius Weiss, who gave him music lessons for free. He also helped Scott’s mum to acquire a piano (Scott played at a neighbor’s before this).

As a young man, he gave up a job working on the railway to earn a living as an itinerant pianist. He soon discovered that there were few opportunities for black musicians outside brothels and churches. That didn’t stop him though.

He kept at it, arriving in Chicago around the time of the World’s Fair. He wasn’t on the bill at the fair but there was plenty of work in the clubs nearby. He moved to Missouri, wrote Maple Leaf Rag, the first instrumental to sell over one million copies of sheet music, and the rest is history.

Joplin wrote 44 ragtime pieces and two operas.

You’re no doubt familiar with his works but you may not have heard the marvelous versions by Itzak Perlman and André Previn. This is called Bethena.

Click to play: Joplin-Bethena

Vaccine Shortages and Drug Prices

In late August or early September, Crabby Old Lady saw a small item in the press somewhere that there might be a shortage of flu vaccine in the United States this year.

Crabby has taken a flu shot for the past 12 or 15 years except one year when, for reasons she no longer recalls, she didn’t get around to it. The flu got her that year and she was sick – sick in bed, fevered, aching, delirious and non-functional – for two entire weeks. It was an additional month before she felt fully healthy again. She has never missed another flu shot.

This year, with that tiny, little news item in mind, Crabby was at the door when it opened on the first morning the vaccine was available from the New York City Health Department. Others have not been so lucky as Crabby; the next day, the shortage was announced.

Since then, there have been continual reports of elders in long lines in the hot sun with nothing more useful than hope that the vaccine will not have run out when their turn comes. Hospitals do not have enough vaccine for their patients.

Several towns have held lotteries - think of it, lotteries for a proven medication that saves thousands of lives a year - for the few doses they have. And scalpers have been charging 10 and 20 times the going price. Crabby has one friend, HIV-positive, who cannot find a flu shot at any price after weeks of searching. He is terrified; if he gets the flu, he may die.

Now, according to a story by Gardiner Harris, it appears more than just flu vaccine is regularly in short supply:

“Each of these drugs, and dozens of others, are in shortage in the United States right now. On any given day, 50 to 80 drugs, many of them life-saving, may be difficult or impossible to find. Some patients die waiting for them, or because a frustrated doctor substituted another drug without having adequate training.

“The larger story behind the flu vaccine shortage is that drug supply disruptions in the United States have become routine.”

- The New York Times, 31 October 2004

In addition, drugs in general are so expensive in the United States that people – mostly older folks on fixed incomes – travel to Canada and, mentioned in the press to a lesser degree, Mexico to get their physician-prescribed medications.

“U.S. citizens regularly cross the border to buy discount prescription drugs at pharmacies in Mexican border towns, where they can save up to 60 percent on drugs ranging from antibiotics to Viagra.”

- money.cnn.com, 22 October 2004

If that is not bad enough, officials repeatedly appear on network and cable news broadcasts to warn against buying drugs in other countries because, they say, those drugs might not be safe. Somehow, Crabby believes, if U.S. citizens were dropping dead in droves from “foreign” drugs, we would know about it.

It is unconscionable that these shortages and high prices can happen in a country that touts itself as having the finest healthcare system in the world - a dubious statement when the United States is listed at number 48 in life expectancy at birth by the 2003 CIA World Fact Book.

How can all this be, you may ask? Crabby will explain: it happens when the manufacture and distribution of medicines are left to the free market.

But drugs and vaccines are not automobiles. They are not television sets, computers, shoes nor any other kind of consumer product. They are life-giving, life-preserving miracles without which we would still have killer diseases such as polio, diphtheria, whooping cough, small pox and measles, the fear of which Crabby can remember from her childhood.

Other diseases that were deadly in her youth are now, if not yet preventable or curable, at least controllable - with drugs created by modern science. It is shameful than anyone in a country as rich as ours must go without needed medications or seek them in other countries.

Health is not a commodity and that is why, in other, more enlightened countries, governments do not allow the market to decide availability and price of medicines as though they were pork bellies.

Crabby Old Lady believes it would be an excellent legacy for future generations if older folks would make it a priority to lobby our representatives in the coming years for a saner, national health policy.

Meanwhile, I decided to let myself off the hook to devote full time for a day to getting organized on this machine without feeling pressured. So – no new post for today. Instead, one from about three years ago.

As I am sure is true for other bloggers, posts come in about three flavors:

1. Not so wonderful, but it will have to do
2. Not bad, I kind of like this
3. Wow. On rare occasions, I'm really good

This is a number 3 post, written in August of 2006. I rediscovered it yesterday when a reader left a snotty note telling me that the title is wrong: “mete not meet!!!” she wrote, “(if you want it right).” Oh, and with a little smiley at the end – to soften the tone of superiority, do you think?

Well, not so fast.

“It is meet and right so to do” is an ancient phrase, a beautiful phrase that trips off the tongue, an old favorite of mine. It is from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, (revised, 1662), in the Holy Communion section; the congregation's answer to the priest's, “Let us give thanks unto our Lord God.” And in that ancient book, it is spelled “meet.”

In the first edition, 1549, it was spelled “mete”, but corrected in the revised version. So I stand by my spelling.

All that aside, it was a pleasant opportunity to revisit a post I am more pleased with than usually and by coincidence, it is nicely related to Wednesday's post. I wish I could turn out stuff like this every day.

It is Meet and Right So To Do

QUESTION: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening?

It is a riddle we all learned in childhood and although I can’t prove it, I think I recall that this particular riddle can be traced to the ancient Greeks. It is, of course, redolent of Ecclesiastes, “For everything there is a season…” and the ignorant ageists among us – those who do their best to keep elders out of the mainstream because they think we are stupid and boring – should be reminded that each era of life has its reasons to be.

A couple of mornings ago, Ollie the cat woke me again when it was still dark, 3:30AM. I could have gone back to sleep, but there was a lovely, cool breeze through the screen door which beckoned me outside to sit on the deck.

It was a surprise to discover there are stars in the sky here in Portland, Maine. I’d almost forgotten about them during 37 years in Manhattan where only Venus is visible and not often. The stars here are not as profuse as in the wilds of upstate New York, where I once had a weekend house, but enough to remind an old city girl that there’s more to nightlife than flashing neon.

I tracked what must have been a satellite – too high to be an airplane - as it raced across the black night. I’d never seen one before.

In the dark, there wasn’t much else to look at and I've forgotten the arrangement of the constellations and their locations, so I settled my mind on the breeze – its rustling in the trees, how it felt on my face and ruffled my hair. How it tugged lightly at the hem of my summer dressing gown tickling my ankles.

This deck attached to my new home is a revelation for me. Years ago, when I wanted a break from what I was doing, I smoked a cigarette. Now I sit on my deck for a short while half a dozen times a day or maybe more, and I find myself attending more closely than since earliest childhood to what is going on around me.

When, in adulthood, we are on career track, chasing success, raising children, accumulating stuff, filling every moment of the day with “doing” until we drop into bed exhausted, there isn’t time to smell the roses. That is as the second season of life should be. (I’ll leave arguments that we have taken midlife busy-ness to an extreme for another day.) With past gardens, I was too much in a hurry to pause; just get the watering done before leaving for work or rushing off to an evening soiree.

But slowing down comes naturally in elderhood. Forces internal and external nudge us to overcome the cultural pressure to be busy. Activities that no longer seem as important as they once did gradually fall away and a quietude settles upon us.

Now there is time for the breeze, the smell of the sea, the swaying of the tree branches, the call of the birds. To watch a bee flit from flower to flower. A spider diligently building her web. How prettily a fallen petal dances, like a ballerina, as the wind pushes it across the floor of the deck.

Plants, like cats and children, know deep inside how to be themselves. When I turn a pot, the leaves soon rearrange themselves to face the sun. When I water them, their whole being perks up; they almost smile and say “aaahhhh.”

The geraniums, the large, next-door, lilac bush whose top branches reach into my deck, the ivy stretching for a place to cling – each, I am seeing for the first time, is a universe unto itself: flowers and leaves, like their counterpart fauna, are born, live oh so gloriously and die as they must, to make room for more individuals. But the universe, the plant, continues and thrives through the generations of its green and gaudy progeny.

Although I have forgotten what it references, there is a sentence somewhere in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer I have always liked: “It is meet and right so to do.” It is meet and right that elders should have time to discover such things as I have written of today and I think that cannot be done without the stillness of body we are granted in old age which begets this new fullness of mind.

So next time you see an old man who seems bored and boring is his wheelchair, or an old woman who appears to have fallen asleep on a park bench, remember that it is their season of quietude and they are learning new things they had no time for when they were merely adults. Perhaps, if you ask politely, they will tell you what those things are.

[NOTE: On the off-chance there is someone reading this who does not know the riddle, the answer is mankind, who crawls in childhood, walks upright in adulthood, and uses a cane in elderhood.]

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Lyn Burnstine: The Last Prose of Summer

Recently The Nation magazine published a long exposé of what former Democratic Congressional leader Dick Gephardt is doing in his second career. In a nutshell, he is making bundles of "money representing every anti-labor, anti-environmental, anti-universal healthcare client he can find..."

During his long career representing a Missouri district, he was best known as a pro-labor populist who worked to achieve health care reform. In 2003 during a short run for the Democratic nomination for president, he proclaimed:

"I'm running for president because I've had enough of the oil barons, the status-quo apologists, the special-interest lobbyists running amok.”

It is disconcerting to say the least that Gephardt now lobbies for drug companies and Goldman Sachs. For The Nation, the Gephardt saga is a cautionary tale of how Democrats who now control Washington are on their way are becoming as corrupt as the Republicans were when they were in charge.

For me, this Gephardt story sets off some cognitive dissonance. You see, for a job I had a couple of years ago, I toured the country showing a film, For the Bible Tells Me So that makes the case for the full humanity of LGBT people.

It's an excellent presentation aimed at mainstream religious people introducing them to nonthreatening, warm, attractive people who are gay or related to gay people.

My colleagues and I agreed that every time we saw it, we perceived new depths in it. Many times audiences cried. And Gephardt, a Roman Catholic who clearly loves his lesbian daughter, is one of the heroic figures in that film.

Being an advocate for gay rights frequently embroils one in contradictions. After all, Gephardt isn't alone as an unlikely advocate for my well being - Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter who recently gave birth to his granddaughter and that seems to have touched even that flinty heart. Can it really be true that there is something about which I agree with Dick Cheney?

Unlike most issues in our society, gay acceptance can, sometimes, cut across left-right ideological boundaries. In general, Democrats are more friendly to us than Republicans - but even Republicans can have gay relatives and friends and learn from their own families about tolerance that can lead to inclusion. And some do. Apparently lobbyists who use their past reputations on behalf of sleazy causes can too.

As I get older, contradictions like this remind me that right and wrong are not simple categories for any of us to navigate. The ways we live our lives are inevitably complicated and compromised. I'm glad that working for gay rights reminds me of this.

And I'm also glad that I remain a fierce advocate, from the left side, for peace, economic and racial justice, and environmental sustainability. That's not going to change with age, but maybe I'll get wiser and kinder as I go along.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Lois Cochran: How Big is Your World?

That happened yesterday reading a new post at David Wolfe's blog, Ageless Marketing.

"[In] the second half of life, the libido expresses desires to recreate the self in less materialistic, more symbolic ways, such as in one’s good works or 'giving back' to others as part of one’s legacy. This is one way people know they can live on, even if it's only in the minds of others.”

David is contrasting this later life development to the first half of our lives when our libido urges us relentlessly to preen and prance and posture in answer to nature's imperative for continuation of our species. Then he gets to my “aha” moment:

”...the Holy Grail in human personality development. At long last [in age] we may find the answer to the biggest question that ever arises in our minds: "Who am I?"

So simply put. So true. Something I have spent tens of thousands of words on this blog trying to get to. He further explains:

”Getting the answer to that question is frighteningly difficult when we are in hot pursuit of careers, intimate partners and social status. A big hurdle is that we tend to see ourselves as we present our masked selves to the outside world. Affectations become an admixture in our self-images.

“Only when we begin to explore the gaps between our social self and our real self can we begin to get close to the answer to 'Who am I.' In this process authenticity comes to replace artifice in the long road to self-realization.”

David blogs about marketing, advertising and branding for professionals in those fields and in the case of this post, he is explaining the need for them to understand the different world view of older consumers they want to reach.

“The persona of youth is about style,” he writes; “the quest for the answer to the question, 'Who am I?' is about substance.”

All of which explains why advertising aimed at elders almost always feels irrelevant to me – they are trying to appeal to old people with the memes of youth. This also applies to just about every aspect of the culture in relation to elders: television, movies, clothing, technology, vacations, etc., soaked with sexual innuendo and status seeking.

It would go a long way toward improving the perception of elders as we really are, not to mention marketing's bottom line, if they hired a few elders as advisers.

Thank you, David, for the clarity.

At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Johna Ferguson: A Speeding Ticket