Precarity, USA - ASA Generations (original) (raw)

Similarly, although long-term care is highly dependent on Medicaid for older adults and people living with disabilities, the shocking preponderance of COVID-19 case and death rates among long-term care residents and staff illuminates Medicaid’s “failure to meet even ludicrously minimal staffing standards,” and cuts in home- and community-based services and managed care.

Governmental and public responses to COVID-19 demonstrate pervasive ageism and discrimination. Repeated and failed policy efforts to legislate universal public access to long-term care and social infrastructure have underwritten the private sector, which is increasingly dominated by for-profit conglomerates and is a dumping ground for the discarded (and low-paid caregivers who tend to them), who are often women and men of color.

How Do We Compare, Globally?

The U.K. and United States face similar problems, with decades of austerity and the poorest bearing the cuts. Local authorities received a 49 percent reduction in central government funding in the last decade, impacting public services. COVID-19 has further stifled charities and the voluntary sector from fundraising activities and income to assist deprived neighborhoods. The U.K. government’s failure to provide aid to its poorest communities underlines the degree to which social processes relating to inequality, discrimination and racism have contributed to the distribution of illness and deaths caused by COVID-19.

India, the world’s second most populous country, also faces significant socioeconomic inequality with an aging population. Indian democracy gives little weight to the needs of disadvantaged groups, and its deep-rooted caste hierarchy often reinforces the social distance between privileged groups and the rest. Only in recent decades has India moved toward central government-sponsored programs resembling a social security system, rather than individual states implementing their own schemes.

Unlike in the United States, where moving older adults into care facilities is more commonly practiced (and where COVID-19 cases have raged), in India, more than 99 percent of older adults either live alone or with their children. However, like in this country, older adults and the poor bear a higher burden of disease and ill health. The vulnerability of India’s older adults to COVID-19 depends upon dimensions such as place of residence, gender, caste, marital status, living arrangements, surviving children and economic dependence.

Can We Turn It Around?

The pandemic has accelerated rising poverty, food lines, child hunger and the danger to and hardships of essential workers, women, older adults and caregivers. COVID-19 is the mirror, reflecting structural inequities and injustices that have pervaded our society for centuries.

COVID-19 forces us to reimagine what kind of society we want to build. The isolating shutdowns have provided time and opportunity to experience formative consciousness-raising, abetted by continuous immersion in news and social media streaming. Anxieties incubate as older adults; Black Americans, indigenous peoples, people of color and intergenerational families witness daily traumas on devices and screens.

Visual and virtual realities transition into a shared copresence, perhaps of fear, disbelief or outrage. Social movements may grow from the embodied emotions that are nurtured as we turn our attention to the collective.

As two economists from UC Berkeley said recently in the New York Times, “[T]these are not normal times. The big battles—be they wars or pandemics—are fought and won collectively. In this period of national crisis, hatred of the government is the surest path to self destruction.” An effective response to COVID-19 demands solidarity and personal and social responsibility in public health by all levels of government and of each of us regardless of age, class, genders, color, indigeneity or health condition.

All people across the life course and globe have a vested stake in aging policy, as we are all aging. We are inextricably linked to others who will enter or have entered old age. Our rights must not be sacrificed. For older adults, there is little hope that their scarcity and dearth of security is a necessary sacrifice, but this is the delusion of survival for generations who avoid their developing experience of precarity.

Gray Panthers co-founder and visionary activist, Maggie Kuhn, recognized the inextricable intergenerational stakes in humanity, peace and collective social justice in nations and around the globe. The security of the young and old are interdependent. She taught us that elders carry the memories of loss and survival. Without these stories, identity is severed and knowing is lost for present and future generational consciousness. Collective interdependence resists neoliberal agendas of globalization and privatization, and discourses that celebrate blaming individuals.