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S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 W W W. T I K K U N . O R G T I K K U N 63 ALAN BARKAN W hat do you want for yourself as you age? Do you look forward to the second half of life or dread it? How do you feel about your grandparents? Do you have a vision for how we can organize our lives for meaning, joy, and connection as we grow into our elderhood? For many, the best we can hope for during the seeming eons between the time we enter the foothills of our aging and the time we die, seems to be: avoid illness, stop working for money, find some hobby or volunteer work to keep occupied, stay in our homes, hope we have grandchildren near enough to get to know them, and pray that Medicare, Social Security, savings, and pensions (if you have them) survive. The worst dream is that, even if we have savings and no longer have to earn, we will end up sick, frail, lonely, and warehoused in a nursing home, burning up our financial legacy as we languish disempowered and without hope. Either way, will we look on helplessly as global warming, destructive governance, and people without vision shred our safety nets and destroy our legacy to the grandchildren and beyond? Don’t despair. Some of us have been passionately struggling and effectively cultivating a vision that has already begun to transform the culture of nursing homes and that has profound implication for all of us as we age. In the 1970s, not long after more than a few of us allowed rhetoric to trump wisdom and proclaimed, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” I had an insight on a vision quest that shaped my life’s work. The insight was this: The restoration of the role of elders to society will ultimately midwife the great cultural paradigm shift from selfish individualism and coarse competitiveness towards an organic, interdependent, purpose-driven new reality that will define our epoch. That vision has energized me as I worked with elders and gained the experience to realize how we can make it happen. Now we are ready to take our work of community organizing for culture change in nursing homes and launch a new initiative that creates the organizational structure for a health-creating society for all. It will provide the antidote to the disconnection, impotence , and lack of meaning that contribute to our social malaise. We need to learn to be effective, as we stand not just for ourselves, but also for the future generations to whom we have an ever-increasing debt. We call this initiative the Elders Guild. The Elders Guild is truly radical, innovative, and based on proven experience. It is a new paradigm for regenerating community. And that is not just the community of the elders, but the whole multi-generational continuum. The basic building blocks of the Elders Guild—the values, methods, structures, processes, lore, stories, networks—have been cultivated over decades. Although in the end it is about transformation of the social and political reality, at the start and the heart of it are stories of cultural and personal change that happen wherever people engage the movement. How Elders can RebalancetheWorld by Barry Barkan Debby and Barry Barkan, leaders in elder-centered community action for thirty years. 6.Politics_3:Politics 8/7/07 10:24 AM Page 63 Stories of the Civil Rights Movement in Nursing Homes My beloved Grandma, who had been the matriarch of our multi-family brownstone in Brooklyn, ended her days in cold storage in a medical-model nursing home, stinking of disinfectant. This was in the late 1960s. I was a civil rights reporter for the Richmond, Virginia Afro-American newspaper, and I had recently pretended to be a minister in order to sneak into a women’s prison to do a story. When I visited Grandma , I saw that people in that nursing home had fewer civil rights than the worst criminal on death row. In fact, she had no civil rights whatsoever...

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