Part V, The Metamorphoses of the Baby Boom into the Senior Stampede

“WhereToGoWhatToDo?”

I have posted two articles that speak about “Where to go. What to do?” as we approach the Senior Stampede.

Aging: America Needs To Address The Coming Hordes

Few U.S. cities are ready for aging Baby Boomer population

               (Click on either to go to my archive to read)

The first article, “Aging,” Mark Schwartz takes on the attitude he sees in our country and culture to the proposition of aging and the manner in which we are not dealing with aging. He says:

The lesson for me (probably only for me) from this awesome episode is -- to quote the venerable Kevin Costner (or his movie at least) -- "if you build it, they will come."

Huh? Build what? Nursing homes? NO. Nursing homes are where the imaginations of the businessmen and governments that create them, and the old people who become their inmates, go to die. No, instead build something much cooler -- a place for the old to live, not to die.

He goes on to state:

We have become a reactive rather than proactive nation in everything but the financial industry's inexhaustible industriousness in finding new and dodgier ways to skim money from the economy. Where's the spark of real creativity and can-do, applied not only to our decaying society generally, but more specifically to how aging boomers can live?

He then goes on to reason that communities plan for most eventualities likely to occur in their domain, but fail with planning for the people in their communities aging. Instead a general cultural denial of aging exists particularly with the people themselves who are aging.

Allowing this to occur we are ripe for exploitation by the predators of profit. They are willing and ready to take advantage of our disregard and inattention and blatant neglect under the guise of helping. And it is their help that is plundering us and making the prospect of the Senior Stampede an cataclysm now in the process of happening.

If the stampede is allowed to go on with no curative action from us we face bankruptcy personally, as communities and as a nation.

The second article posted “Few Cities are Ready” deals with our state of un-readiness. It cites the apathy caused by our public policy of “CutBack”, the numbers forecasting the calamitous results of this apathy and the need to do something within our power to avert the catastrophe.

Henry Cisneros Secretary of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton administration is quoted saying: “Communities can do some preparations on the cheap.” This queues into my last posting for this article: Chapter 23. Criteria and Recommendations for Change in the Care of Dementia of my book HOPE A Working Primer of Care For ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE

In this chapter I open a discussion about “WhereToGoWhatToDo?” This is followed by three chapter of specifics which specifics will be the subject of additional posts.

The point of this post is simply this. A catastrophe is coming. We can’t depend on the resources which took care of averting something like this in our recent history. We have evolved in the past 82 years following our last time of desperation intending to avoid this kind of occurrence. This has not happened. The grief is upon us again.

Now it is up to us to change the whole paradigm and find way or ways to avert this by utilizing means within our power to use. The ways and means are there. They simply wait our innovation.