Category Archives: Activisim

AD(H)D World

As grandparents and elders, we should be troubled by the startling rise in developmental disorders among children today.  Autism and ADHD have become commonplace — one in every 110 children for autism; nearly one in 10 children in the United States aged 4 to 17 years for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — and so are kids on meds and in special education.  Some experts point to better diagnostics for learning disorders (LD) in general, but I’ve wondered what role our speedy, information-saturated culture plays.  What might be the effect of  food additives, dyes, artificial sweeteners, or just too much sugar in everything we eat?

Yesterday, I had two experiences — a film called Bag It! and an NPR program (Our Toxic Love Hate Relationship with Plastics) — that make a strong case that the epidemic of learning disorders we are seeing in our young is due to exposure to chemicals, in utero and in infancy.  The chemicals in plastics, that is, specifically phthalates or plasticizers, ubiquitous in toys, food packaging, hoses, raincoats, shower curtains, vinyl flooring, wall coverings, lubricants, adhesives, detergents, nail polish, hair spray and shampoo, baby care products and, until recently, baby bottles.

We are from birth to death, literally saturated in plastics: see Five Gyres, if you still believe that when our plastic bagged garbage is picked up from our curb or dumpster, it goes ‘away.’ As one interviewee in the film said, There is no away.

As grandparents, we need to be concerned, very concerned, and we need to decide what we personally are going to do about it.  You might start by watching Bag It! , now part of the Whole Food Film Festival, Do Something Reel, showing this month in celebration of Earth Day, April 22, nationwide.

In another lifetime, I helped promote plastics professionally. You could say this is by way of a small mea culpa.

Helping Japan

The first thing many of us want to do after we absorb the news of a catastrophe like the tsunami in Japan and its aftermath, is reach for our checkbooks.  Money is important, of course, but where and when and whom it best serves need careful consideration.  For instance, after Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma, the country of my birth, I discovered that the most effective relief agency was The Merlin Group because they already had staff on the ground, familiar with the population and local conditions.  For the same reasons  I gave to Partners in Health after the Haiti earthquake.  This time, I also decided to wait until it was clearer where a relief donation could do the most good.  Apparently, I’m not alone in this: http://blog.givewell.org/2011/03/11/japan-earthquaketsunami-disaster-relief-donations/ Once again, the key is to target dollars to local groups.  http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/15/what-aid-makes-sense-for-japan/work-with-local-groups-in-japan

Check out what your community or congregational response is, and join it if it meets your criteria.   Here’s a list of agencies vetted by InterAction: http://www.interaction.org/crisis-list/interaction-members-support-japan-earthquake-response A useful article: http://www.interaction.org/how-help

Hands Across the Sands

Maybe you don’t think of yourself as someone who joins a rally in the street brandishing a hand-lettered sign and shouting  slogans.  Me either.  Whenever I get an email alerting me to a social action that requires me to actually show up, I find myself wondering if my physical presence really matters, say, at a rally with members of my congregation in support of affordable housing in my community.  I question whether I really need to drive down to Senator Bill Nelson’s office when I could sign a petition on line or fax or call him.  Not that those things aren’t important, too.  Then I remember what Gandhi and Martin Luther King accomplished by being willing to put themselves at risk, and I feel ashamed of myself for even hesitating.

There are some things that cry out for organized, apolitical action and the BP spill and all that it represents — corporate greed and malfeasance, hubris, folly — is one.  If you live anywhere near a beach, particularly in Florida, you can take a stand.  Chances are excellent that someone is organizing a  local Hands Across the Sands event on June 26.  As the name suggests, it will be a human chain lining the beaches at noon for 15 minutes, to express opposition to offshore drilling and support of clean, renewable energy.

The movement actually started in Florida on Saturday, February 13, when thousands of Floridians representing 60 towns and cities and over 90 beaches joined hands to protest the efforts by the Florida Legislature and the US Congress to lift the ban on oil drilling in Florida’s waters.  Florida’s Hands Across the Sands event was the largest gathering in the history of Florida united against oil drilling.  Thousands joined hands from Jacksonville to Miami Beach and Key West to Pensacola Beach.  On June 26, we’ll be at Juno Beach, wearing this DYI T-shirt.

If you’re landlocked, you can organize or get involved in a different kind of action.  Here is a list of other volunteer opportunities connected with the BP spill.

Other ways to get involved in saving the world.  If our generation doesn’t, who will?

Faith-based activism

The Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers

The Elders

Oh, I’m Just a Volunteer …

Every time I hear someone say “I’m just a volunteer,” I feel like pulling that person aside for a pep talk.  Like ‘just a housewife’ which once kept women in their so-called place, this phrase speaks of self-sacrifice and low status.  It has no place in the reality of what community service is and could become in the 21st century.  One fact: U.S. Government data for 2008 show that 61.8 million Americans or 26.4 percent of the adult population contributed 8 billion hours of volunteer service worth $162 billion*.  Much harder to calculate is the impact of community service on civic life, except when one tries to imagine what life would be like without the hundreds of nonprofit organizations, foundations, faith-based charities, service clubs, and the PTA.

Possibly someone who calls herself  just a volunteer hasn’t found a fit between her skills and an organization that knows how to put them to good use.  Sure, we all gladly stuff envelopes, work the phones and canvass during a campaign, but if you regularly donate your time, you need — perhaps even more than people on the payroll – a clear sense of mission and how your efforts are helping accomplish it.  Research shows that the real challenge is retaining volunteers, one-third of whom quit after the first year.  If you are one of these folks, think again.  Whatever you have to bring to the table, there is the right match for you, and a world that badly needs your time and care.

There is much evidence that suggests we are hardwired for altruism.  Good Samaritans of all ages, shapes and sizes turn up all the time.  People risk their own lives to save someone else’s.  Why?  Because, as people committed to community service soon discover, it feels good to give.  Brian Mullaney, co-founder of Smile Train, puts it this way: “The most selfish thing you can do is to help other people.”  Children do it.  Busy people do it.  Even those of modest means and education do it.

I think of the story our UU minister told last Sunday.  On the way home from a wedding ceremony in rural New Jersey, her car broke down.  It was getting dark as she got out, dressed in high heels and long minister’s robe.  She stood by the highway, trying to flag down some help.  Many cars passed without slowing down.  Finally, an old van packed with a family of migrant workers stopped.  They made room for her and drove her to the nearest gas station and phone, then waited until they knew help was on its way.  “They were tired and probably hungry,” she said, “but they waited.”

I think of our eight year old granddaughter who raised $100 all by herself for the children of Haiti.  And the Cub Scout troupe our grandsons belong to, that does regular beach cleanup.  And I think of the Purpose Prize community, “individuals over age 60 who are defying societal expectations by channeling their creativity and talent to address critical social problems at the local, regional, or national level” at a time when many of their peers consider their work and their best years behind them.

Community service is contagious when we take pride in what we do.  And we should, no matter how lowly the task may seem.  Serving helps you connect with other people; it encourages you to learn things you didn’t know, even about your own capacities; you feel a part of something bigger; you feel needed, depended upon, valuable. Sometimes it opens doors to a new career, friends, a mate.  So doing the right thing by others is ‘selfish’ because, as all the wisdom traditions teach, we are one.  The people who really need a pep talk – or something stronger – are the ones who saw a woman stuck beside her car on a highway, and just kept right on driving.

More resources:

AARP Create the Good

Idealist

The Purpose Prize

Volunteering in America

Volunteer Match

*Using Independent Sector’s 2008 estimate of the dollar value of a volunteer hour ($20.25).

Aging Without Mr. Right

Nearly one in six elderly unmarried women age 60 and over (17 percent) was poor in 2008, and 16 percent of those 75 and older were poor. (Unmarried Women Hit Hard by Poverty, Center for American Progress)

I was on the phone not long ago with a friend, I’ll call her Arlene, who has been absent from my life for some time.  Because she works two jobs (it was 2.5 for awhile), we had been playing phone tag for the last few days and that may also be why we’ve been out of touch.  We caught up with each other because I was housebound, beginning the infamous ‘prep’ for a colonoscopy.  I might have to end the conversation abruptly, I told her, but would call her back.  We shared a laugh over that.  She is a few years younger than I am and is yet to have this routine procedure.  In fact, she had not seen a doctor or had any kind of screening for a long time. “I haven’t had health insurance for ten years. I couldn’t afford it.”

What’s wrong with this picture?  A lot, both on the micro and macro levels.  My friend is well-educated and has worked in the entertainment industry for her entire career, holding glamorous jobs — or so they seemed to me — at some of the best companies on both coasts.  We were both in our 50s when we met, and she thought the future would continue in a direction commensurate with her education, talent, experience, and good looks.  She fully expected to continue to live in a home she owned, in an urban area with all the arts and culture she was used to. She was my idea of an independent woman: not looking for a man to complete her, but not against the possibility that Mr. Right could turn up.

So far this hasn’t happened, and she appears to have grown comfortable with aging as a single woman.  And according to an AARP study, many older women would agree, see: The Secret Lives of Single Women. What isn’t such a rosy picture is what aging as a single woman might mean to her financial future, especially if she becomes ill or disabled.  Mothers of single daughters (I am one), listen up!

Arlene’s is a familiar enough story: as her industry began to contract, she lost better jobs to younger people.  This is systemic, apparently, and not just at the level of female superstar who disappear from the screen at a certain age (Meryl Streep the obvious exception). Over the last few years, Arlene has mostly worked freelance and so health insurance has been beyond her means.  “Who would have ever thought I would be looking forward to Social Security and Medicare?!” she asks.  Until she reaches the age of eligibility for these benefits (and possibly even when she does), she will likely remain one of the working poor: healthy (fortunately) enough to work, able to pay her bills (just), saving nothing, and earning too much to qualify for Medicaid.  It’s a tough situation for anyone, but worst if you’re a woman and earn less to begin with.

Sexism combined with ageism might have done my friend in, except for her remarkable resilience, sense of humor, and the support of  female friends of which she has in abundance.  Friends for company, advice, conversation, comfort and sometimes financial help.  Arlene doesn’t expect a fix from inside the Beltway.  She’ll keep working; she’ll eat right, exercise, keep herself healthy; she might relocate where housing and living costs are lower.  She’s nobody’s fool.  Those of us who are happily partnered need to look out for our single sisters of a certain age as well as our unmarried daughters of an independent mindset.  And I’m not talking about finding them a date for Saturday night.

Resources:

Unmarried Women Hit Hard by Poverty

Wiser (Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement)

Women Work!

…and the Purpose Prize Winners Are

  • Judith Broder, a psychiatrist who now enlists therapists to provide free counseling to returning veterans and their families
  • Timothy Will, a former telecom executive who brings broadband – and profits – to economically distressed farm communities in Appalachia
  • Henry Lui, a professor who now turns toxic waste into safe, “green” bricks

broderHenry LiuTimothy Will

Five Purpose Prize winners have won $100,000 each. Five more won $50,000 each.  And 49 were named Purpose Prize fellows.  What distinguishes the Purpose Prize from others is that it not only honors past achievements, but it provides the funds and recognition for winners and fellows to continue their groundbreaking work.

Retirement?  Not for these folks.  They are just getting started on Encore Careers that will make the world a better place.  Read about their big ideas.

Get Back!

350-chart_0Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged, sang The Beatles.  Fast forward a few decades and an entirely different world, Get Back could be the mantra for the 350.org, a group of environmental activists including author Bill McGibbon, Van Jones, founder of Green for All and most recently, Obama’s point man on the environment, and Dr. James Hansen (the NASA scientist whose testimony before Congress in the 1980s helped bring the issue of global warming to the foreground.)

350 is the number that leading scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide—measured in “Parts Per Million” in our atmosphere. 350 PPM—it’s the number humanity needs to get back to as soon as possible to avoid runaway climate change.  Click to understand 350 better.

October 24 is the International Day of Climate Action.  This is 4,000 events in 170 countries, the biggest movement on the planet.  We will head down to Delray Beach to join others in Palm Beach Country in the Climate Change Wall of Hope and Shame.   After hearing from members of the Palm Beach County Environmental Coalition; representatives from the Reef Rescue Team; members of the Whitecloud Turtle Rescue Team; and Greenpeace, we will all stand shoulder to shoulder at 3:50pm for 350 seconds.   Will you stand with us?  Click here to find local events.

See what other older adults are doing:

Gray is Green

Green Seniors

National Senior Conservation Corps