Today’s Agenda
The leading edge of the baby boom generation is already facing the question of how to care for aged, infirm parents. As the boomer population bulge ages itself, the issue could overwhelm all other health-care problems--just ask anyone who’s been responsible for the care of an Alzheimer’s patient. Some people, fueled by personal need and farsighted concern, are looking for inventive solutions today. One of these is Linda Laisure, who invented home-like residential settings for women with Alzheimer’s disease and similar mind-robbing illnesses. The residents have plenty of daily living assistance, without the coldness of high-tech medicine or the cost of a skilled nursing home.
Laisure’s Helping Our Mobile Elderly (HOME) project is the subject of today’s Making a Difference. As Laisure points out, the only part of the equation that’s missing for such residential-care settings is money: Insurers won’t pay for it, nor will Medicare, and though the cost is less than most nursing homes it’s far from cheap.
A more immediate hot-button issue than elder care is immigrant employment, though the issues are related. As with child care, the institutional aides and home companions who form the base of elder care are often low-paid, immigrants. In Testimony, immigrant-rights attorney Susan Alva says that since the passage of employer sanctions, any application of labor law to undocumented immigrants has gone out the window. They’re treated as virtual slaves, Alva says, by people unwilling to offer wages and conditions good enough to attract legal workers.
It’s been said that the video age will be the death of reading. And what does that mean for the traditional arts--live dance and theater, classical music, poetry, painting, fiction? High-school students pooh-pooh the concerns of their elders in Youth Opinion, saying that video games and other interactive entertainments can probably coexist with the traditional arts--as long as arts providers try harder to make theater, dance and poetry more exciting to kids and less like museum pieces. There’s disagreement, though, on whether video games are ultimately beneficial or harmful. As one student put it: “Once you start playing for hours on end, day after day for months, serious damage is liable to occur.”
West Hollywood will vote on it soon, as will Pico Rivera. Compton has already said yes. Bell Gardens has done it for years. All over Southern California, municipalities are looking at legalized gambling to save crumbling tax bases. In Platform, city officials, legal experts and those who understand compulsive gambling debate the worth of legalization. As one thoughtful observer notes, if everybody makes it legal, nobody will make any money.
Municipal moneymaking is also the subject of today’s Gripe. Why, asks Jeffrey Lantos of Los Angeles, does the city close its libraries but still employ five people just to get a car towed off the street?
And in Getting Involved, Roselle Lewis of Tarzana gives an eloquent sense of the satisfaction to be gained from working at a food pantry.
