The Time is Now

The following is an excerpt from 50+: Igniting a Revolution to Reinvent America by Bill Novelli with Boe Workman.

I’m one of those lucky people who chased a dream and caught it. When I was appointed chief executive of AARP in mid-2001, I felt as if my whole career had been preparation for this one job. I’ve always had a deep interest in making a contribution to solving major social problems and creating positive social change. At AARP I found my perfect opportunity to make a difference.

We have a saying at AARP that age is just a number and life is what you make it. For Americans who are age 50 and over, the number is 50+ and the life you can make at that age has infinite possibilities. That plus sign means that more people are living longer and that people turning 50 today have more than half of their adult lives ahead of them. The plus sign also means that people thinking about retiring now have the opportunity to create a better quality of life, leave a legacy to our country, and ignite a revolution that will change the way we think about aging in America.

From age 50 on up, Americans are refusing to rock away their retirement. They’re starting new careers, rallying for causes close to their hearts, raising grandchildren, becoming more active in their communities. In short, they’re changing the face of aging in America.

I’m energized by the opportunities that lie ahead. I wake up every day excited to go to work at AARP, because we have the ability to make a difference. Working together, Americans can transform health care, create a secure retirement for all, make Social Security solvent, build livable communities for older Americans, and revolutionize the workplace so that those of us who want or need to continue working can do so—all of which will leave lasting legacies for future generations.

One major obstacle to national progress is the current period of nasty, partisan politics in Washington. This isn’t good for democracy, and it’s definitely bad for our country. I think we can do something about this. As individual citizens, we can call upon our elected representatives to reform the system, stop the pettiness, and work together for the good of the country. I think it’s time to unelect some people, so that a clear message is delivered—focus now on the people’s work. Of course this requires information and thought on who should be reelected and who should be unelected. That’s our job as citizens and activists.

As the civic leader John W. Gardner once said, “We are all faced with a series of great opportunities—brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.”

Following are a few of the many exciting opportunities for reinventing America:

Transforming Health Care

It’s a wonderful world we live in. Thanks to advances in public health and hygiene, medical breakthroughs in antibiotics, vaccines, and surgeries, plus new treatments for old killers such as diabetes and cancer, people are living longer and healthier lives than ever before. The members of the 50+ generation do less grueling work than their parents did. They smoke less, get more and better medical treatment, have less heart disease, and suffer fewer strokes and disabilities. Prescription drugs have largely replaced hospitalizations and surgery as first-line treatments.

At the same time, America’s health care is outrageously expensive and getting more so every day, with costs rising far faster than the cost of living.

One critical first step is to bring medical record-keeping into the 21st century. Today, many, if not most, medical records are still kept on paper and must be mailed or faxed among health care providers. The exchange of information is painfully slow and costly.

I remember that a few years ago, when my parents spent winters in Florida and came back to Pittsburgh in the summer, they had doctors in both places. But the records didn’t travel back and forth with them. There was a great deal of duplication and lots of family discussion over whether one set of physicians knew what the others were doing.

My discussions with members of Congress, the Bush administration, other policymakers, and senior executives have convinced me that most of these leaders see the issues clearly. The experts know what needs to be done. Already in the works is a sweeping bipartisan project to create a complete electronic record of every American’s health care and to link all the records into a giant medical server called the National Health Information Network. When it gets up and running (2014 is the target date), all the professionals treating a patient in the health care system will supposedly have access to any patient’s file—with safeguards to protect privacy.

The network has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives every year and, by some estimates, cut up to as much as $120 billion a year from health care costs.

Reinventing Retirement

Americans’ increased longevity will hugely affect the period of life we call retirement. It’s no wonder boomers are pondering the 20, 30, or 40 more years they have left and asking: What do I want to do with the rest of my life? How will I make it significant?

What most people today don’t want is to be shoved off to the sidelines of society. Whether they change careers, start a new business, do volunteer work, learn a new discipline, or phase into part-time work before packing it in altogether, the 50+ generation wants to be part of the action.

For many of us, finding purpose in life has been an ongoing adventure. My first job was in consumer marketing at Unilever. Later I left that company to go to an ad agency. I was climbing the corporate ladder, but I felt that something was missing. I wanted something that was more socially relevant, and I was determined to change course.

As I began to explore how and where, I was assigned a new client, the Public Broadcasting Service. I attended a conference that featured Joan Ganz Cooney, one of the creators of Sesame Street. I was fascinated by Cooney and the Sesame Street approach to learning. The thought struck me that marketing tools and practices could be applied to ideas, issues, and causes as effectively as to the laundry detergents, toothpastes, and pet foods I had been promoting. In 1972 Jack Porter, Mike Carberry, and I founded Porter Novelli, a public relations firm that became involved in many health and social issues, including environmental protection, cancer detection and control, and reproductive health and infant survival in developing countries.

When I retired from Porter Novelli in 1990 at the age of 49, I had no intention of beginning a new life of leisure. I wanted to pursue my goal of making a difference by beginning a new career in public service.

My boyhood friend Mike Ferris also has his own version of retirement. After a career in engineering at Westinghouse, he and his wife, Pat, moved to Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina, partly to be near their daughter and her family and partly because of the longer golf season. Soon Mike got involved in AARP Tax-Aide, a free program that recruits and trains volunteers to help taxpayers, especially older ones, do their tax returns. He likes helping people and working with other volunteers, and it still leaves him plenty of time for family and golf.

All indications are that more and more boomers will follow in the footsteps of people like Mike Ferris. More than 70 percent of people over 45 expect to keep working into their so-called retirement years.

We must work together to ensure that the needs for age-friendly housing, mobility, and community engagement are met for older Americans. This will take careful planning if we’re to be prepared for the aging of the largest population bulge in human history.

Public relations entrepreneur Lizbeth Chapman learned the importance of advance planning the hard way when she moved from Boston to a charming cottage on Cape Cod. Nowhere near retirement, she’d given no thought to making her new home accessible for someone with a disability. Then the unexpected happened: she broke her ankle and had to be fitted with a nonwalking cast.

For the next three months her new house became, in her words, “a prison.” Her wheelchair was too big for the doors and hallways; she had to hire help just to cook a meal because nearly everything in her kitchen was beyond her reach.

With a lot of help from friends, Chapman muddled along till her ankle healed. But the experience made her realize that her cottage might well be unlivable in her old age. Five years later she hired workers to redo the house with extrawide doors and halls, a walk-in bathtub, lever-action door handles, lots of open space, and reachable kitchen appliances. Her only regret is that she didn’t think of all this sooner.

Like Lizbeth Chapman, millions of us are failing to consider how our housing needs might change. The answer is to start doing that kind of planning now.

Many of the changes needed to keep our homes livable as we grow older are neither extensive nor expensive. Government also has a role to play in keeping us from becoming a “nation of nursing homes.” We must remind our elected representatives that quality of life is sustained by keeping people in their homes, where they can stay connected to family, friends of all ages, and familiar surroundings. We need to advocate at the state and local levels for building and zoning regulations that promote both age-friendly new housing and older-home renovations.

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When people who are now 50+ were living through the 1960s, Bob Dylan was singing “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” And it’s no different today. Deep in America’s fabric is a can-do attitude that says “I can make a difference.” We are at a unique moment in history when the need for change, the demand for change, and our ability to create change are coming together. For the 50+ generation, the time is now.

From the book 50+: Igniting a Revolution to Reinvent America, by Bill Novelli. Copyright © 2006 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. Also available as an abridged audio CD from Audio Renaissance.

All proceeds go to the AARP Foundation.