THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW MAGGIE KUHN
Lyman, Francesca
THE PROGRESSIVE Interview Maggie Kuhn A wrinkled radicals crusade BY FRANCESCA LYMAN Since her sixty-fifth birthday, Maggie Kuhn has almost singlehandedly created, nurtured, and built a...
...We have set a pace...
...Q: Do you see anything promising happening in terms of nursing homes...
...And they are both in conflict, or potential conflict, with the same people: the young with their parents, the old with their children...
...And he saw me on a television show and wrote the studio for my address and got in touch with me...
...KUHN: There are three: It's costly, it's inaccessible—there's nothing in the countryside, it's too far away...
...See where we're going...
...And the old and the young are both in difficulty as far as jobs are concerned...
...We've got to find ways in which this historical perspective and memories and experience of older people can be plowed into present decision-making...
...Look...
...Yet both are free to be the change agents, to change society, to work for an enduring peace...
...The Gray Panthers in Buffalo, New York, meet on the campus of the college...
...If you don't have some kind of coverage, you could be bleeding, you could be comatose, but you're not going to get into a hospital...
...We've been able to save that...
...Young people are told they don't have the experience, and the old are told that what they know is passe...
...In our high-tech society, we think everything happens in Washington...
...Different drugs and different pushers...
...We're missing a historical perspective that older people can provide...
...State by state, city by city, patient by patient, we tell people we need a new system...
...KUHN: Well, it's going to benefit a limited number of people...
...The classic effort, which was so dangerous, was his effort to privatize the Social Security system...
...All kinds of people come up to me and say, "You are my role model...
...And the young are hooked on crack, speed, and go to jail...
...But the real power is at the grass roots...
...We've been working with some corporations, Polaroid for example, which have been very much interested in nonretirement and in the retooling of older workers for new jobs...
...KUHN: We're working very hard for a national health-insurance service, which is like socialized medicine...
...Q: Has Ronald Reagan, being old himself, done anything for older people...
...One of our members has come up with a wonderful one-liner: "The bottom line is a substitute for the Hippocratic oath...
...Q: Why do you make your appeal to the young as well as the old...
...At least we've got Social Security...
...When she was forced to leave her job at sixty-five, Kuhn began working with five other older people to change the mandatory-retirement laws...
...More older Americans are going to school and realizing that they can learn and have something to give, that by re-education and additional training they can be a part of a new society...
...We told them that the Social Security system constituted a contract between the American people and the U.S...
...Before Social Security was enacted fifty years ago, there was a much greater degree of poverty...
...We're all doing it...
...She just turned eighty-two, and one of her current goals is to end the housing crisis for the elderly by introducing "shared housing" for young and old alike...
...they voted in favor of a public health-care system...
...And it lobbies on national issues that concern the rights of the elderly as well as the young, such as health care, Medicare, mandatory retirement, and Social Security...
...It is universal in its coverage: from prenatal care right up through rigor mortis...
...We've been very outspoken in our positions, and we've caught the attention of the media...
...Q: You've gotten younger as you've grown older...
...Q: How is your health...
...KUHN: There's a very urgent need to do that because there's a contrived effort to set the old against the young, to persuade the young people that old people are getting too much, that we're all rich and well-endowed and that they're getting robbed, which is not true...
...KUHN: There should be a moratorium on building nursing homes...
...And the corpor-atization of American health care...
...Well, something happens in Washington...
...Q: Do you think older women have changed as a result of your efforts...
...MAGGIE KUHN: It came with this competitive, profit-centered society that throws people away, that views old age as a disease, that says if you don't have a job, you're nobody...
...Q: How are young people responding to your message...
...Founded in 1970, the Gray Panthers is now a nationwide organization of almost 60,000 members, with ninety local networks in twenty-four states...
...What I'd love to see is cadres of think tanks of radical, older people who could delve into public policy...
...People in power positions think that the old don't know much because we don't do much...
...The military budget...
...It's paid out of general revenues...
...It has to be monitored and judged and kicked out...
...But we say retirement should be flexible and optional...
...It would be similar to what we've got for the armed services...
...I've spoken about him in contemptuous terms across the country and have received wide applause...
...Q: What can ordinary people do at the local level to help the lot of older people in terms of health care, nursing homes, health insurance...
...Q: Has the lot of the aged worsened in the last twenty years or gotten better...
...Q: Do you think we need to slow down a little...
...And the rest are young...
...It's a scandal...
...KUHN: We've eliminated mandatory retirement for Federal To get along in a man's world, you had to dress like a lady, look like a schoolgirl, think like a man, and work like a horse.' employees and a number of state employees...
...KUHN: Yeah, but we had to do that, of course...
...The doctors and nursing-home directors hook us on drugs and get rich...
...Qi What are you working for instead...
...KUHN: Medicare is an eroded piece of legislation, thanks to Ronnie...
...We're doing it state by state...
...I met one of the men I was engaged to fifty years after we were engaged...
...Your taxes and mine...
...Grass-roots organizing is absolutely essential...
...They'd thrown them away...
...You get a whole generation of workers displaced...
...Q: You're convinced you can't go for national legislation...
...And we talked a lot individually to members of the committee...
...KUHN: We have organized older women, and there is a new public awareness...
...You see, we're not an old-folks' lobby...
...And New Jersey has had a nonbinding referendum on it that was handsomely adopted...
...Q: What about Medicare...
...KUHN: That ain't going to happen to me...
...It covers less than 38 per cent of the expenses—the deductibles under Social Security...
...He doesn't identify himself with his peers in age...
...they are not thinking of themselves as old but as contributing and creative elders of the tribe...
...But otherwise fine...
...But she's not...
...He's a liar, a congenital liar...
...There was a commission established and we weren't invited, but we came and demonstrated every time it met...
...KUHN: No...
...KUHN: When we started the Gray Panthers in 1970, our first issue was the war in Vietnam...
...KUHN: Slow down and reflect...
...Older people can provide the historical perspective...
...KUHN: Health care...
...They can document the costs and the poor health care they've gotten...
...She's a "wrinkled radical," as she herself' proclaims...
...KUHN: I've gotten freer...
...There's a new political awareness and a new self-esteem among older Americans...
...The House Select Committee on Aging had some hearings on older workers and they documented that companies had retired workers whose skills were irreplaceable...
...KUHN: At the moment...
...But we're convinced that we're going to get a health service installed and in place before the turn of the century...
...Why is that...
...KUHN: We see a resurgence of activism...
...When we go to college campuses to speak, there is a great response from the students-traditional students and nontraditional students...
...The old and the young are going through the most changes...
...It emphasizes grass-roots organizing around local community issues— whether exposing conditions in nursing homes or ferreting out housing and labor practices that are unfair to the elderly...
...The need for the old and the young to be able to work together...
...Government that couldn't be broken...
...Q: How do you want your epitaph to read...
...He's not to be trusted on any count...
...KUHN: I have failing eyesight, rapid deterioration of the eyes, and a hard time swallowing...
...Another historical moment for women in general has been the emergence of the nurse practitioner, the nurse clinician, the nurse educator, the autonomous nurse, the one who doesn't follow the physician around three steps behind, saying "Yes, doctor, yes, doctor...
...And they were trying to get them back...
...THE PROGRESSIVE Interview Maggie Kuhn A wrinkled radicals crusade BY FRANCESCA LYMAN Since her sixty-fifth birthday, Maggie Kuhn has almost singlehandedly created, nurtured, and built a national movement to bring young and old together—the Gray Panthers...
...Women are still the underclass in many ways...
...And it still is a man's world...
...Standing in her kitchen, her grannie glasses slipping down her nose, Maggie Kuhn could be any grandmotherly woman living in a rowhouse in Philadelphia's aging Germantown neighborhood...
...And they think of children as not having very much to say because, well, they're children...
...KUHN: In some respects it's improved...
...It's health care for profit...
...And liberated...
...Q: Many people tend to become more and more conservative as they grow older...
...The second factor is that some five chains of hospitals are now buying nonprofit hospitals, even the ones run by nuns...
...There are some who are rich, but there are increasing numbers who are poor—particularly women...
...They're out of the mainstream, and they're not taken seriously...
...They can remember how people worked, and they can remember the value of a job, a faithful, productive job, and a commitment to a job, and the training necessary to do it well...
...Losing hair and growing hair...
...The nursing homes cost about $1,000 per month...
...There's no disgrace or shame in growing old," she says...
...Q: What are the biggest issues as you see them today...
...Q: How can you confront corporate power in the health-care area, or elsewhere...
...I'm just going to get more outrageous...
...Q: You've said you think Americans have a kind of sick view of older people...
...They formed the Gray Panthers and went on to build a movement dedicated to eradicating ageism and to bringing "young and old working together for a better world for the young to grow old in...
...Today, Maggie Kuhn is still at it...
...KUHN: Well, you see, you change the capitalistic system...
...They've rendered human skills obsolescent...
...KUHN: I'm lucky...
...They have their own autonomy...
...The old and the young are both into the drug scene...
...KUHN: Two reasons: The growing number of people who have no health-care coverage—thirty-seven million people of all ages...
...We should be able to keep the elderly in their own homes...
...They're not defined by their husbands...
...Q: What are some of the common bonds between the old and the young...
...At this point, it doesn't cover the kind of continuing care, the long-standing disabilities, arthritis, the long haul of creeping disability...
...KUHN: We've studied the health-care system in Canada and the different provinces...
...He was a doctor...
...I've had great love affairs, wonderful love affairs...
...In the Gray Panthers, probably 65 per cent of the people are fifty and older...
...And that was the occasion for our becoming intergenerational...
...Q: Some kind of socialized medicine has been talked about for years...
...He doesn't think of himself as old...
...The enormous debt created because of our military budget...
...But something like 70 per cent of the American people over the age of sixty-five have only Social Security benefits as their sole income...
...With all the high technology, you can realize a handsome profit...
...Could you explain that label...
...Not on any count...
...Do you think it has any chance in this country...
...Q: Why are you opposing the catastrophic-health-care legislation...
...I was so surprised...
...I can't think of anything good he's done...
...He said he'd love to see me, so when I was out in California for a speech, he went to the meeting...
...Q: What kind of power and influence do you think the Gray Panthers have had...
...KUHN: They can get together in neighborhood groups...
...My generation has to be heard and heeded...
...Afterward I went over to his house and he said, "You know, Maggie, you are misguided...
...But if I had married them, my life would have been over...
...And the sadness is that the people at the grass roots have not sensed their power...
...KUHN: Here lies Maggie, under the only stone she ever left unturned...
...The Industrial Revolution took place over 100 years...
...To get along in a man's world, you had to dress like a lady, look like a schoolgirl, think like a man, and work like a horse...
...KUHN: Both the old and the young are marginalized...
...Q: Do you ever regret not getting married...
...But the technology itself is not appropriate...
...New York and California are next...
...Q: You call the Gray Panthers intergener-ational...
...Francesco Lyman is the editor of Words by Wire in Washington, D.C., which syndicates newspaper features, op-ed articles, and commentaries to the nation's newspapers...
...And we were advised by the Canadians to go the state-by-state route...
...Q: Are you disappointed by women who just fall into the footsteps of men...
...So misguided...
...We never have been...
...We've not thought about it...
...KUHN: We've had enormous success, all out of proportion to our numbers...
...Now some of the technology is good, but the way they've been introduced, and the rapidity with which they've been introduced, have created hazards...
...It was set aside, no matter how Ronnie would try to bankrupt it...
...I recently talked with her at her home, which she shares with two housemates separated in age by fifty years...
...Q: What success have you had in changing the mandatory-retirement laws...
...I was engaged twice...
...Q: How's that...
...You establish a new health-care system...
...Massachusetts adopted it last November two-to-one...
...It's not enough...
...And that's a so-so home...
...The desperate need for housing—safe, decent housing...
...These are Gray Panther operations...
...These technological changes have taken place in less than ten years...
...Q: What would you say is the number one health-care problem...
Vol. 52 • January 1988 • No. 1
