After EMS: How to Scare a Senior
Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series from Mike Rubin. In this series, he’ll reflect on his career and share practical retirement advice for emergency medical personnel. Catch up on articles you missed.
When I was a child, I was afraid of loud noises. I’m not sure why. Our home was peaceful and safe, with an average amount of adult arguing that never led to slammed doors or shrill threats.
I decided to do something about my No. 1 fear on a morning like any other during the late 1950s. In the daylight of our modest Massachusetts living room, I loaded a cap pistol with a red paper roll, then wrapped three bath towels around my head. I may have resembled a demented, top-heavy gunslinger, but I was simply a self-conscious kid trying to grow up.
I started firing the pistol into the air—CRACK, CRACK, CRACK—and kept at it as I unwound one towel at a time. The bursts got louder but less startling. By the time my ears were completely unmuffled, I was no longer sensitive to my least favorite noise and my cap gun was just another toy.
Sixty-six years later, I’m coping with a new fear—one that has replaced the tedium of retirement with unyielding anxiety. I’m not alone. There are millions of people my age worried about losing government benefits as part of a massive federal overhaul. Although some high-profile administrators are promising not to cut senior assistance, others seem unsympathetic.
During a March interview, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick downplayed the loss of retirement income. “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out the checks this month,” he said. “My mother-in-law, who is 94, wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t.”
My perspective on mothers-in-law may be off—I no longer have any—but an elder’s silence doesn’t necessarily imply indifference. My parents’ generation was taught not to complain, even when wronged.
Or perhaps I’m reacting to the narrow demographic—relatives of wealthy cabinet members—that represents hardly any of my fellow retirees. Social Security payments mostly help those with few connections and limited means.
Lutnick isn’t the only public servant tormenting me. Leland Dudek, acting commissioner of Social Security as of this writing, responded to a judge’s restraining order by threatening to shut down the department’s computers.
“As it stands, I will follow [the ruling] exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems,” Dudek said. “Really, I want to turn it off and let the courts figure out how they want to run a federal agency.”
Social Security isn’t supposed to be a proving ground for some suit having a bad day. We already have laws stating who gets what. If a top-down effort to break that system ever overwhelmed the desire to make it better, our nation would be in a dark place.
Seniors aren’t asking for anything extra. Most of us keep our dignity by trying not to burden the rest of you. If we seem inconvenient, please be patient. We still have much to offer—solutions to problems you’ll face long after we do; an informed perspective on history before it’s rewritten; a family recipe for chocolate pecan pie.
As for our fear of government-inflicted loss, perhaps the cure is my old ally, desensitization—not with bath towels and cap pistols, but through repeated exposure to 21st-century spite. Secretary Lutnick offers this example directed at Social Security recipients, “A fraudster always makes the loudest noise screaming, yelling, and complaining … The easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Whoever screams is the one stealing.”
No pie for you.
Mike’s Exit Poll #5: What’s the dumbest gift you ever gave a spouse or close friend?
I bought one of those pocket multi-tools with 67 attachments for my wife. (Whoever just said, “Of course you did,” be still.) Okay, maybe it had more like 20 attachments, but that’s enough to repair my old goalie mask if I had to.
Helen says she will never have to.
Mike Rubin is a retired paramedic and the author of Life Support, a collection of EMS stories. Contact Mike at mgr22@prodigy.net.
