Omaha Community Action for the Elderly

This week, Julie Masters Ph.D., head of the Gerontology Program at UNO posted an article to the local newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, about the community efforts to help the elderly during this Covid-19 pandemic.

I submitted a letter to the editor with an encouraging response:

It’s inspiring to read the Midland Voices piece by Julie Masters about the Omaha community’s effort to support the elderly during this Covid-19 pandemic. This outbreak serves to highlight the longstanding problems associated with not only elder care, but how society regards the elderly.

In “Elderhood,” a book by geriatrician Louise Aronson M.D., a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, she mentions the negative connotation associated with the term “old age,” and how its use harms our perception of the elderly. “At the very least, we are losing an opportunity to look at the final third of life with the same concern, curiosity, creativity, and rigor as we view the first two-thirds.”

Cicero is quoted: “ Old age will only be respected if it fights for itself, maintains its rights...and asserts control over its own to its last breath.”

We’re now thrown into a whirlwind of activism, looking for ethical answers for problems long ignored, with a determined sense of hope.

And, indeed activism should be the approach now as we look for solutions. My Eudaimonia Project is meant to create that vision.