Activist Retirees Ruminate on Issues, Alienation, Lost Values

They sit around a table in the community center, six Sun Belt retirees. I have asked to meet with them because older Americans are one of the nation’s most attentive and demanding voting blocs--should they want to be a bloc. Also, older Americans are among the most loyal readers of the newspaper.

These are not six random retirees, but local activists for the American Assn. of Retired Persons, AARP, arguably the most convincing mega-lobby in American politics.

In a church meeting room here in the south New Mexico desert, one of those hot spots beckoning retirees into the long sun, the tempo and range of the conversation is demanding. Health care, education, government, social values, the future, the past. The seven of us argue and listen and argue some more.

At the end, half a notebook is filled and I am on the spot.

How to cast the account of this little seminar?

One choice: Present retirees as stereotype. You know, selfish and looking out only for themselves.

“I’m a speaker for AARP on health care. I travel to all these little communities. . . . AARP has a reform plan that takes the best of all the plans that are out there . . .” says Marilyn Steffel.

Yes, but who will pay the cost and how much?

“I’m not sure who pays; nobody has asked me that.”

Oh. Perhaps this reasoning explains why the United States spends 11 times more benefit dollars per capita on those over 65 than those under 18, according to a 1988 study?

Who cares who pays; just pay.

Emmett Shockley, however, takes some of the zing out of this approach when he allows, “Yes we’re selfish. . . . We see that we’re greedy geezers, and it’s time for us to do something about it.”

OK, how about poking a little fun at their self-absorbed view of politics?

Again, Shockley: “There is a question today whether we control government or government controls us. I’m personally convinced that it controls us. The special interests, anyway, they control us. . . .”

Well, isn’t that rich? The elderly lobby has secured for itself everything from discounted bus fares and park admissions to a Social Security system that is fiscally sound for the current generation but not the next. (The Social Security Administration says the fund could be depleted as early as the year 2023.) How much bigger of a special-interest target could one desire?

Neil Burn steps in to try to defuse this one from personal experience: “I guess you could say that I’m here today because of special interests. The space program and research is a special interest. That kind of research gave us the pacemaker, which I have in my chest at this moment.”

OK, how about presenting the six as poignant?

Who, for instance, is arguing the case for them--the fixed-income money savers--as interest rates are cut and cut again in hopes of stimulating more borrowing by younger people and business?

“I’m getting 9% on my CD. But it’s about to mature. Then what? I need that to live on. With low interest rates, 2%-3%, I’m going to have to go into my principle. I’ll be OK--as long as I don’t live too long,” says Bob Vonderharr.

Only recently retired, Vonderharr already is experiencing rollbacks in health care coverage and he worries about pension cuts. As he talks, heads nod all around the table. The terror of the aging: Even if they planned for retirement, wild gyrations in the economy leave them vulnerable.

Once again, Shockley: “You got to wonder, what are we going to do with all these people? Maybe we can do like the Indians and leave them out in the desert?”

But, wait, this generation survived the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War. Let’s not be hasty today in writing its epitaph.

So maybe what we have is one of those stories where the nut of the matter emerges at the end.

“In my life I feel a sense of alienation from the mainstream,” ruminates the talkative Shockley.

What? Alienated from the mainstream?

An old circle of bitterness, it seems, refuses to close.

“Alienation from the mainstream”--wasn’t that the celebrated cry of the offspring of this generation that is now retired?

Back then, it was the Vietnam generation stewing in its furious alienation from the World War II generation?

Now, generational authority is shifting in the country, a fact very much at work in this campaign. The World War II generation will soon, or eventually must, yield its control of America to its children, but not--at least as far as these six go--without Angst .

In our round-table today, it all comes back, arguments of a quarter-century ago: The length of one’s hair. Living together. Free speech. War. Civil rights. These things are not forgotten; not forgiven.

They are voiced here as character questions for a whole generation.

“Today, our values have been lost. Everybody has lost a sense of direction. The Hispanic people who I work with cannot hold their families together. The 40-, 45-year-old has lost touch today. They are too busy working or socializing. There are so many one-parent families,” says Juanita Montoya.

Heads nod in agreement.

Again Shockley: “We were the people who saw young people try to tear our society apart. And they did a pretty good job.”

Adds Steffel: “And now we have no values. . . . But that is changing. You’ll see that more of us in our generation are asking, what can we give to the younger generation of today? What wisdom do we have for them? But that middle generation is still so screwed up. . . .”