The Future Is Us

I recently returned from Florida—I went down to watch some spring training games of the Minnesota Twins. (They’re looking good, but as my brother Kelly points out, the Twins have recently been named the best lineup in all of baseball, so isn’t that a jinx?) If you want to have a sense of what our communities will look like in ten years, visit Florida.

Go Twins!

Everywhere you went there were old(er) people. They took tickets at the Twins’ gate, they served the beer, they were wheelchaired along boardwalks in the Corkscrew swamp. Everything… slowed….down……. And I got impatient (tear the damn ticket already!). But maybe slowing down will be a good thing for our society.

On my way home from Nina’s coffee shop this morning, I heard someone saying, “Where did all these old people come from?” Go to Florida and get used to it.

In case you haven’t looked at demographic charts lately (or ever), I’ve included one here. For the first time in the history of humankind (really!) people over the age of 65 will outnumber school aged children. This will create fiscal problems galore, but dollars aside, none of our “systems” have been set up with this age distribution in mind. None.

My son’s father tells the story of when he was a boy growing up in a small town. Once a year, elderly Mrs. Johnson would take the car out for a spin. Mrs. Johnson couldn’t see very well, and she certainly couldn’t drive very well. So the word quickly spread throughout town—“Get off the roads! Mrs. Johnson is out driving today!”

This may work in Cumberland Wisconsin, but it’s not a very practical overall strategy to help seniors maintain their mobility. Nor have we figured out how to accommodate seniors who need help with their daily activities. In fact, we may not even have accepted it.

Two weeks ago I moderated a community discussion in Woodbury. A 45-unit Alzheimer’s housing has been proposed, including 15 units for those with advanced stages of their disease who aren’t always able to control their behaviors. Many in the local community are opposed. (See the Strib's coverage by Jim Anderson, or the Woodbury Bulletin's by Scotte Wente. One resident simply said, "You're seeing a roomful of people that don't want you there." The neighbors insist that theirs is a family community. Now I ask you, if seniors are not part of our “families” then where do they belong?

Many baby boomers have been living under an illusion that they can “control” and sanitize their lives. I’ll move to a place where I won’t have to look at death or aging, where there’s no poverty or crime. But getting old changes all of this. It is harder to find a job if you need one (I’m guessing all the seniors in Florida were volunteers). Health fails, and sometimes memory. Nest eggs are insufficient for fixing the roof or paying for out-of-pocket medical costs.

My imploration (ok, so it’s not a word, but I like it) to baby boomers is to start thinking about the kind of society you want to live in when you are elderly, and start creating it now. Do you want to be shipped off to the hinterland or would you like to live with or near your family? Do you want to be scraping by and choosing between food or meds or can you start saving a little bit more now? Do you want to be sickly and immobile or can you become healthier now in order to have a more active lifestyle later?

If we don’t start accepting and planning for what is inevitably, indisputably, incontrovertibly an aged society, we’ll find ourselves at the receiving end of our own policies. What would you like those to be?