Re: Unseen Bullying Epidemic in Senior Communities - with hot link
From: Dick Margulis (dickdmargulis.com)
Date: Wed, 16 May 2018 07:53:07 -0700 (PDT)
On 5/16/2018 9:39 AM, Ann Zabaldo wrote:
What is maybe a surprise is our expectation that people will become sweeter and 
gentler as they age.

And with this, a story.

Many years ago, I lived in a small town where one of the highlights of the year was the firemen's field days, a three-day orgy of beer, greasy food, and polka.

One year, when my kids were small, my parents visited that weekend. We went to the parade, of course. And afterward, we went into the exhibitor tent, where one of the local churches had an ice cream booth. My dad, who until he was deep into his dementia could add a column of numbers in his head faster than an accountant could with an adding machine, offered to treat. The nice church lady had to write down the price of everything the six of us ordered and laboriously calculate the sum by hand and aloud, thirty-write-down-zero-carry-the-three style. As we walked away, my dad shook his head. "It's amazing someone can live to that age and never learn to add," he said. "No," I countered. "People don't get smarter as they age. What's amazing is that people that slow survive to old age at all."

Okay, that was mean, and in retrospect I'm sorry I said it. I'm nicer now. But it's just another aspect of Ann's point: people don't change much as they age, except physically.

The saving grace of cohousing in this regard is that bullies don't tend to be attracted to cohousing in the first place, so dealing with them as they age may be less of a problem than in the sorts of institutions featured in the article.

Dick Margulis
Rocky Corner
Bethany CT
Construction is underway: rockycorner.org/blog/



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