Retire

There is one surefire way to make older Americans spitting mad. Tell them to keep on working.

"Retirement," I wrote, "is a failed social experiment."

"Speaking for myself," I continued, "I don't believe in retirement. Not as we know it today. I think it's an economic scheme, parlayed with rampant age bias, that has been perpetrated upon the United States."

I doubt our present concept of retirement can survive another 10 years. We Americans, as a nation, need the labor, brainpower, and experience now vested in those with white hair, full figures, sensible shoes and an insatiable desire to contribute, to be heard!

Well, I no more than published these deliberately provocative views in a non-selling book ("Be An Outrageous Older Man," KIT, 1998) then the letters, dipped in venom, began arriving. I shall never forget reading the salutation, "Dear Stupid Ass."

My correspondent, Andrew J. Smith, of Latrobe, PA, had worked 41 years in steel mills, and that was after World War II combat duty. Soldier Smith was caught in the now historic Battle of the Bulge, and remembers fighting against "the Germans, the cold and all the other miseries of war, all for $17 a month." For his efforts, the Pennsylvania infantryman was awarded three battle stars.

I surely did not begrudge Andrew Smith, a survivor, his views or his outrage. He explained how he quit school in the eighth grade, to better support the large Smith family that numbered four children.

Now, no right-thinking person can blame Smith-or anyone else--from fleeing a job where you must work with your body against grinding, wearing tasks. This, however, is not the entire issue; not in a technological age.

For many, perhaps most of us, retirement at age 55, 60, or even 75, is not the very best idea. Not for our health, not for our emotional equilibrium, and certainly not for our financial standing, or lack thereof. (Note: isn't retirement just another word for unemployment?)

All this came flooding back when recently I read, in Aging Today, the American Society on Aging newspaper, that author Marc Freedman also received some cranky senior responses. It seems that Freedman, who views older Americans as "a vast untapped social resource; an overlooked national asset" for the 21st century, wrote we should have more unpaid volunteers.

Freedman, incidentally, is president of non-profit Civic Ventures of San Francisco, and a big thinker. His book is "Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America."

When Freedman heard an earful from an unhappy woman of age, who had been working ("a paragon of productivity") since she was 16, and reported she was completely exhausted, he understood a number of things.

First, he reports, is that Americans work too hard too long ("Midlife overwork in America has reached pathological proportions."). Next, he wasn't making himself understood. Neither this Californian nor I advocate seniors jumping back into wearing, 9-to-5 jobs that demand little beyond showing up and bending to pointless tasks.

"What this society needs to do," writes Freedman "is to widen the range of compelling pathways available to individuals in later life." Yes, and one more thing: to remember, always, that we need one another.

The late John W. Gardener, social activist, educator and role model to Freedman, said shortly before his death, "I sometimes think that history might say (about the United States): 'It was a great nation, full of talented people with enormous energy, who simply forgot they needed one another.'"