Book on Aging Americans
Katherine Brown (kbrown who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Sun, 4 Apr 1999 12:36:56 -0700 (PDT)
Hi
I was prompted to suggest the following book by an earlier mention
of newcomers and oldtimers.
Pipher, the author of "Reviving Ophelia" has just published a book
called "another country", in which she describes the lives of the
young old, those who are aging and have their health; the old old,
those whose friends and abilities are lost to illness and death;
and thier baby boomer children and their children, who are often at
a loss to understand the problems and losses the older gerneration
are facing.
The book characterizes aging Americans as living in another country,
in that nothing is set up for them and theriir understandings and
norms are vanishing from the landscape as we, (the US) lose our
sense of community, communal living, connectedness and other things
that carried elders through wars, the major inventions of the 20th
century, the depresion, and other forms of hardship that shaped
their psyches and characters.
She speaks of the aging as having come from another time that was
pre-irony, pre-television, pre-Freudian analysis and pre-"me".
She doesn't leave it at some vague nostalgia for the good old
days, because she acknowledges that there was a lot of repression,
narrowness, parochialism and frustration that went unaddressed and
unacknowledged before people were able to experience mobility and
propseprity that baby boomers enjoyed more than old-oldsters who
saw so much hardship in the earlier part of the century. But
she asks importaNT QUESTIONS about intergenerational understandings,
fomrs of support and cooperation that were given in those days,
and what we have lost nand yet stand to lose when the olderst
generation goes.
There is a lot in that obook for people facing terminal illness and
the care of difficult and unhappy elders. It is a hard book to
read, but its very provocative for people who think about how
knowledge does and does not pass between gnererationsnerations. It is more
common for people to think n terms of cultural differences between
ethnic groups or gender identities or class groups, but the dimension
of time and clashes between the means and ends of people from
different temporal landscapes is a topic that is eventually and
necessarily, ineascapable for us all.
I recommend it to everyone on this list. I m only 32 aNnd it made
a lot of sense to me. I learned a lot about what lies ahead.
Katherine Brown