I’ve had several very cogent and supportive comments made about the Social Security posting a couple of days ago. They inspired me to do a little further contemplation on old age, social benefits and the politicians who make laws about them and led to these Douglas type free associations.
In 1776 half the population of this country was under 16 years of age. Less than 2% of the population was over 65. Old people were revered in America up to about 1780. People like Ben Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were respected not only because they were clever, but because they were old.
In those days, older meant better. Old people had the best places in church. The eldest son had the lion’s share in the disposition of property. "Honor thy father and thy mother, "was one of the Ten Commandments, obeyed by assumption.
During that stage in our history, when people were asked their age they nearly always added a few years in an attempt to seem older and tap into the automatic respect that age commanded.
Today an astonishing number of men have been 39 for years. People often pretend to be younger than they are. Being old has lost its appeal.
Up to about 1790, men's clothing was designed to make men look older than they were, both by the cut of the jacket and by the practice of wearing a white wig. Cast your mind back, and recall the pictures in your fairy story history books. Some of those posturing men in the tight silk stockings, knee pants and long jackets, had white wigs before they were 39 years old. What a switch! Now look at the desperate attempts to seem young, as if aging is an evil.
The Complete Oxford English dictionary gives the year in which any word was first used with a specific meaning, or when the meaning changed. It is pretty interesting to word detectives to see that most of the words used to insult old men arrived in a thirty year period from 1790 to 1820. In 1790 “Gaffer” was an affectionate term for grandfather. By 1820 it had become “Old Gaffer,” and it was now an insult. “Fogy” used to mean an honorably wounded, military veteran. Now it is an insult. “Old Guard” was a term of great honor for the very best of Napoleon’s experienced soldiers. Now it has all kinds of ‘stick in the mud’ negative connotations.
It seems that a revolution in thinking and attitudes about the elderly took place about the time of the American and French Revolutions over ostensibly political principles. After that time old age began to be contemptible. Veneration began to be replaced by neglect or antipathy, and the worship of youth began, and continues unabated.
Today, the worship of youth is a cleverly orchestrated, commercially inspired and well-organized cult. We all know what Gershwin thought of Methusulah’s chances with a girl, and modern fiction, TV, or cinema, has few strong, noble, or dignified old people as characters. Older people in real life are being sucked in by the power of the unspoken assumptions of their contemporaries. Such assumptions are the ultimate weapon of coercion to conform, in any society.
The whole class structure and rules of behavior in Britain depended for centuries on the unwritten, and unspoken power of assumptions. Everyone knew how members of their class were expected to behave without having it spelled out. Here the society is more fragmented and the assumptions are now prepared and subtly, and not so subtly presented in the media as ‘what’s in,’ everybody knows,’ 'everybody's doing it,' 'It's sweeping the nation,' and a dozen more that you can verbalize from the ads that show you, rather than tell you, what behavior is acceptable, and what isn’t.
But these assumptions, whether evolved or deliberately created, are still assumptions.
It is clear from history then that attitudes toward young and old are socially, not biologically inspired. The veneration accorded the elderly before 1790 was accompanied by the social assumption that youth would venerate. Since Freud we have become accustomed to the assumption that youth would rebel. So they do.
Nowadays it is hard to find people who will say they are old. One semantic problem is the deliberate word association in this country of the word old with the word obsolete. They do not mean the same at all, but are used as if they do. Madison Avenue, of course, plays up to those with the need for conspicuous expenditures and the elderly get a bad press and skewed reporting.
I’m eighty as I write this. Some people would call me old. I call myself long lived. Old is an attitude. I doubt that I shall ever be old.
Over two thirds of the people over 60 in a recent New York survey said that they were middle-aged, rather than old. Many women now live long enough for the last child to leave home while they still have 25 or more years left in the 'empty nest' syndrome. This is ‘supposed’ to make them feel old, confused, and unwanted. So they do.
Mandatory retirement at 65 is a factor in the old/obsolete pattern. Why 65? Well, in the 1880's the German Chancellor, Bismarck picked that to be the pensionable age, and the number has stuck with us.
Yet we all know people who could carry on their jobs with skill and high productivity after age 65. Many studies have shown that in jobs where there is no need for hard physical labor, the reliability and skill of the older workers make them a greater asset than the younger. Some professionals even in fields like dancing and physical education are in their 90's.
My fencing instructor, Léon Paul fenced like a combine harvester way into his early 70’s and would have Olympic fencers sweating like bulls as they tried to hit him as he stood on his famous handkerchief without moving off it.
In the 70's as a better known example, Dr. Mabel Lee, the famous physical education specialist was crowned May Queen at Coe College. She wore the dress in which she graduated magna-cum-laude at Coe in 1908, over sixty years before. Madame Alexandra was a classmate of Nijinsky and Pavlova, and was still putting her ballet students through tough lessons at age 91. The South End Rowing Club in San Francisco meets daily for a swim of from 1 to 5 miles. Members are in their 60's, 70's, and 80's. One of our neighbors is 89 and he plays tennis every week and swims regularly.
There are thousands of counter examples, but the deliberately created, media stereotype remains. The old are supposed to be poor, mean, grasping, weak, bad-tempered, usually sick, slightly stupid, and hard to get along with—and who wants to?
Well, it is true that many elderly are poor. It is also true that many are worn out after years of humiliation at the hands of bureaucrats, and with the effort to survive on Social Security, which was not initiated here until 1936, more than twenty years after the last country to do so in Europe..
France had an old age support system in 1850, Germany in 1889. The last European country to do so was Sweden in 1913. With typical humaneness the US government had no pension or retirement plan at all for its human employees, while retired Army horses had rations for life. Compulsory old-age pension plans were attacked for 20 years as un-American by clergymen, politicians, capitalists and labor leaders alike.
During this furor, and while the elderly were suffering the cruelties of neglect, poverty, and contempt, the US had the largest pension plan in the world—for veterans only. From the War between the States to WW I the Government spent more than five billion dollars in benefits, an astronomical amount in today's dollars. War has always taken a priority position in this country.
Nevertheless, the politicians continued to mouth the cry that a system of old age pensions was a radical departure from American tradition; too expensive to consider. Many of these professional hypocrites were of course, way older than the age at which their laws forced others to retire, and now their fully funded pensions are always secure, and more than ample. Were they on Social Security the poor would see some swift action on their behalf.
Their current successors, through the miracle of the modern media, are working hard to convince the younger folks that in some way or other it is the fault of the elderly for living so long. Every excuse has been taken to try to steal from the Social Security trust fund.
What to do? Here is a proposal that I first heard in the 70's. Just look at the principles involved. If the Government put just $20,000 in a commercial bank account for every child in the week in which it was born, at 6% compounded annually, and legally untouchable until age 65, the principal would have become over $880,000, at 7%, over $1,650,000 and at 8%, just under $3 million. That was before the criminal elements in the financial industry were bailed out by public money and then refused to lend money to the public. But look at the principle involved.
The pensioner could then draw on the interest as a fully funded pension. On death the balance in the account would go back to the fund, as it would if they died before age 65. The principal is never touched. Only the interest. The fund continually grows because of the people who die before retirement age.
The Social Security administration could be scrapped, saving millions annually, and no extra administration would be needed. The present banking and insurance systems could easily deal with it if they could be made more honest by severe legal penalties. After all there are two credit cards for every American now. The system is in place.
The simplicity of the principle behind the plan is staggering. What could prevent every American citizen from having a fully funded, rock solid, pension plan for less than the cost of the written off military aircraft that crash every year? Only this. Nobody would get any benefit from the continually increasing fund until 65 years after it began. Do you know, or can you conceive of any politicians who could be trusted to keep their hands off those billions for sixteen election periods? IF NOT, WHY NOT? Look at your answer and at our "Government for the people." Which people you might well ask.
There are many other available solutions. The will to do something that will not benefit the present incumbents is what is missing. So is a vision that can look beyond the next election. Our political system promotes greed as a virtue. These are the real obstacles to solving the problem. Our officials have enormous, secure pensions, and free health care. In our society some are more equal than others, apparently. Think about that next November, even if you have been 39 for a decade or so.
