To the Editor:
Midge Decter has reached the heart of the problem [“Growing Old in America,” January]. It is essential that an elderly man or woman have a decent income in order to enjoy life. What has surprised me is that conservative clergymen will admit this while some sociologists, social workers, and liberals can’t recognize this fact.
Miss Decter should have written an article on the forty to sixty-five-year-old group. Employment and promotion bias against these older workers makes many of them feel rejected by society. Automation, declining industries, and mergers make life tragic for them when they are laid off, because few employers will hire them except for the most menial jobs.
If America is to attain greater productivity, it must mobilize its . . . idle but qualified manpower. Even the most ambitious retraining program will be futile if retrained workers are not hired because of their age or any other prejudice. . . .
Walter W. Storey
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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To the Editor:
Midge Decter’s . . . observation that the feeling of the inveterate patrons of our city parks, the very young and the very old, toward each other is “one of hatred” . . . does not gibe with my experience. Over sixty-five myself, I reside in a teeming and not overly genteel section of the Bronx, and frequent the parks in the neighborhood. Rarely, however, have I seen mean, rude, or crass behavior manifested by the elderly to the young. What I see is how the aged take joy watching the frolics of tots—an old woman . . . offering a candy to the toddler who strayed to her bench; a wizened old man with awkward sprightliness going to retrieve the ball that Junior threw out-of-bounds. . . . A number of those I know did not have “a life properly lived” yet bear no “resentment, bitterness, and envy” towards the young. At the “golden age” they are not competing even among themselves. . . .
J. S. Oestreicher
Bronx, New York
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To the Editor:
Midge Decter blames our old age problem on America’s unwritten social code which dictates, “save, defer, lay by, put off.” I doubt that this . . . is the real heart of the matter or even as . . . operative as it once was. As Miss Decter states, a great many old people feel they’ve never lived, and now they never will. But is it . . . not rather that in millions of cases, neither a man’s job nor his leisure time activities succeeded in developing any resources of character or meaning for his life to sustain him later? In obedience to society’s definition of him as consumer, the average man buys the latest cars, radios, and refrigerators, installs himself as the passive . . . spectator before them. The majority of jobs cannot awaken in him interests or resources that might make these objects . . . less compelling. When he grows old, he feels as Miss Decter puts it, that he’s been “had.” Perhaps at last, he sees his life for what it is; perhaps not. At any rate, he cannot but feel the limitations of the role which our economy has stamped upon him.
Joanne Bentley
New York City
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To the Editor:
. . . A more fruitful analysis [than Midge Decter’s] might be as follows: “Senior citizens” are merely young people grown old, not a special category of human being. They possess no greater wisdom today than they possessed ten years earlier. Their distinction lies in the fact that they cannot strive day-to-day for their livelihood, and they are approaching the end of their lives. . . .
And therein lies the real anguish of forced retirement: the TV set has broken. . . . The chips are down . . . questions one has dodged all one’s life suddenly assert themselves Transfixed by idleness one must either answer, continue to lose oneself in diversion . . . or grow bitter, jealous and resentful of youth.
In these terms, any attempt to put the blame on society is either cowardly or lazy. What can society possibly do? . . .
The answer is not “. . . the collection of all those present moments that might one day become real and self-defining remembrances.” Who cares about remembrances? We are talking about life. What old age needs is real activity, but activity undertaken in the knowledge that all activity is futile . . . because it all ends with the grave, and from this knowledge gain the saving insight that there is no such thing as great and transforming experience . . . that life is a day-to-day affair right up to the end. . . .
Increased social security payments and medical benefits are tangible goals, but they will not bring tranquility. The shelter of a well-built philosophy is available only to those who take the trouble to make one.
Martin L. King
Arlington, Virginia
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Correction
To the Editor:
Through a misprint in my letter in the March issue concerning Oscar Gass’s article “China and the United States” [November 1962], . . . it appeared that I myself was a supporter of the government of Chiang Kaishek. The sense of what I wrote, however, was that Maurice William, about whom I wrote an article for the Chicago Jewish Forum some years ago, has been a long-time supporter of the government of Chiang Kaishek, and I learned enough of Mr. William to feel sure that he could not possibly have supported the kind of regime which Mr. Gass described.
Milton Hindus
Newton Centre, Massachusetts
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