time once again for community forum and we're very lucky to have with us live in the studios once again tom carpenter tom carpenter is executive director of the hanford challenge prior to his current position he worked as the director of the nuclear oversight campaign for the government and talent accountability project also known as gap from one thousand nine hundred five to two thousand and seven he founded the cincinnati alliance for responsible energy known as care helped establish and is a board member of the hanford concerns challenge is an organization that's based in seattle but has a regional membership and we focus on the cleanup that is supposed to be happening at the hanford nuclear site hanford nuclear site is a former military production facility to make plutonium for the nation's nuclear arsenal it started a war to in develop the plutonium that was used in the facility in the united states though it has two thirds of the nation's high level nuclear waste and most of the low activity nuclear waste so called in the lot of chemical contamination etc and this is a  reservation basically and south eastern washington state and it's about five hundred eighty five square miles so they hanford site is now it's no longer producing any military materials and it's in cleanup mode and has been since one nine hundred eighty nine and u s taxpayers are spending about two billion dollars a year on this cleanup is probably going to last another fifty to one hundred years maybe longer at the pace are growing and we spent about forty billion forty billion dollars on the cleanup so far we have very mixed results well right there's been some cleanup along the river corridor or where they had nine reactors and they've knocked down a lot of buildings dug up some contamination they're starting to clean up some of the ground water through what's called a pump and treat program but the biggest problem out there is really the high level nuclear waste that's left over from the processing of spent nuclear fuel and this waste is stored in underground tanks out there there's fifty six million gallons of this waste stored in these tanks there's probably another one hundred twenty million gallons stored basically dumped to the soil and there's also there's a lot of cleanup to do there this this is very very toxic material that last anywhere from hundreds of years and toxicity to millions of years so in it's very dangerous and tiny quantities but that's a big challenge there we have a cleaned up any of that waste so king five local n b c affiliate has been doing an outstanding series on hanford and one of the issues that they have been bringing to light of late a problem with workers there being overcome by toxic vapors can you talk about that sure we've we have a long history with this issue ourselves at hanford challenge and then before that gap  what happens at hanford is that these large underground nuclear waste tanks that contain all this radioactive waste has a lot of chemicals in the waste and there's  level or layer of liquids and solids to this waste and then there's a head space in a space there these tanks although they're underground the they pressurize so they have to be vented and they're allowed to  m otherwise they could implode or explode and that would be a bad day you know for everyone so there's a constant exchange of of air and that means that what's whatsoever in the tank calms out  now of course say they filter for radiation coming out of these tanks and what's called a heap a filter which is high energy particulate so it captures particulates but what it doesn't capture out there is vapors vapor is basically a gas in a transition phase from a solid you know two to gashes and it can go back to the solid if it needs to are or liquid or whatever so these vapors they're very hard to capture they go right through most filters and workers end up inhaling these vapors on occasion someone gets really sick there have been occasions where workers have died after exposure to these vapors from brain damage and chronic illnesses it's there is chemicals in these vapors that are known to cause cancer there is no except a bull exposure limit for a chemical known to cause cancer we don't know at what level of exposure that an individual make contract cancer from exposure to these suspected or known carcinogens yet they present in these tanks and they're known to be present in in the vapors that workers breathe then so for the last thirty years it's been documented that workers have needed medical treatment they've been hospitalized after exposure to these papers and they know what's happening because people get nosebleeds had a bad taste in the mouth really bad smell in some cases some people have lost consciousness people you know sometimes experience pro fuse sweating that won't stop for a long time  and then so those are the temporary kind of symptoms that people have felt they go to they are the clinic or the hospital they're examined but nobody knows what they've been exposed to there's thousands of chemicals in these vapors and hanford does not basically cannot do a good job of monitoring the exposures out there we're talking open air exposures and tiny tiny quantities of chemicals that can be very dangerous in those tiny quantities but snatching those molecules out of the air at the time of an elation is just impossible they don't do it they can't do it and many of those chemicals need to be analyzed for in a laboratory  so they don't have a laboratory sitting right there that they can use for the at so it in other words you've got a hazardous waste environment where papers come and go unpredictably sometimes predictably people breathe the men and then get ill but doctors are unable to diagnose what they're looking at what might happen to these people and the vast majority of workers who get exposed recover at least temporarily and are back on the job within a week however some don't come back to work depending on the severity of exposure others may get dozens or even hundreds of exposures over their career and then one normal exposure basically is the tipping point where they become really sick and they don't come back to work so king five has been documenting  the injuries and illnesses resulting from these exposures because starting march nineteenth of this year a group of workers succumb to vapor exposure at the tank farms at hanford and then more workers from a different tank farm and the number started growing first it was six then it was eight then it was fourteen and at this point in time as of today june twenty ni twenty eighth there have been about thirty nine exposures to vapors at the tank farms requiring medical evaluation or hospitalization it's a tremendously large number of people and what's m to to me he is why hanford has not taken any steps to protect these workers from these vapors in the short term right like right now people like every week there's a new set of exposures what what are you doing while d the department of energy is the agency that runs this site and it's a federal agency and their response to that question is well we're doing a study wow really  impressive right it's they've done thirty studies of this thirty comes from the deal itself they told me that a couple of weeks ago and i was aware of most of those studies and i've read most of those studies and they all pretty much say the same thing which is are dangerous they contain chemicals that can cause cancer there's they're present in the tank in very high numbers and people who and hail these are subject to unknown medical risks but some people are at high risk so for example one study that was performed in one thousand nine hundred eighty seven documented that workers who inhaled even from a single exposure from one tank at the one of the how did in seventy seven tanks out there what they looked at one tank at the risk of cancer a fatal cancer was as high as sixteen and one hundred one point six and ten the e p a is action level is one in a million so if someone may get cancer at one in a million in the e p a takes steps to protect people at hanford it's one point six and ten for a fatal cancer from a single exposure and yet no respiratory protection for these people you know to speak of  they they only take action when someone gets you know has a symptom they smell something or it or they have a advanced heart beat or something like that but there's really no way to measure this stuff effectively out there so this is a crisis is a medical crisis but it's also an occupational health crisis at the nation's most toxic chemical site in the nation but it's also the rich is right it's getting two billion dollars of year a year of taxpayer money and they've got an industrial hygiene protection program it looks like it's in the one nine hundred fifty s and they just refused to spend the money on it to actually protect the workers out there what if they're not protecting their own people you think they're protecting the environment where they're protecting us and other humans out here i don't think so i think that if they're not willing even to protect their own their own people that there is there's something else going on at hanford  that is deeply deeply wrong with the system that just won't listen so this is this is a very serious situation that's unfolding right now at the hamper site so why are they giving their people  breathing units so that they could either breathe fresh air or at least filter out known stuff out there right so i'll hasten to say that workers are given what are called half masks and these  are sometimes called combo cartridge masks or or p a p r's their hoods however vapors go right through those filters so i call them half assed masks because they look like they're doing something but they're no more effective than then a little dust mask that you might put on if you're you know doing work around your house there they might as well not do it do it because it's still hot in uncomfortable so the reason they don't use the most effective protection which is the fresh air the supplied air is that you know first and foremost is very expensive and they don't want to spend the money on what it would take to build the infrastructure if everyone used fresh air so for instance there are only forty instances where they use fresh air in the last year at hanford  so out of the many many hundreds of people that have worked at that the tank farms in that in that time frame people who request it can't get it they're told it's not safe to wear it because it's heavy and hot  and causes you know strasser you can't see it you know it's sad or so the the reason for that is that the program out there doesn't think that these chemical vapors are harmful and i keep hearing that message over and over you read the newspaper coverage on this and the quotes from you know the top officials talk about nuisances and some people react to it like perfume right well excuse me no there's video d by king five of gary saul dying in his hospital bed from this a trembling and scared and there's other folks out there in the saying in the same story and there are you know i talked to a doctor in spokane who's been treating hanford workers and he's diagnosed twenty six workers from hanford who were exposed to chemical vapors and contracted toxic encephalopathy which is brain damage isn't just really cause brain damage when he told me twenty six it knocked my socks off i mean that's huge you always and where this they don't bother to ask anybody they don't talk to me about it they just they put on the blinders and put the plugs in their ears and even though this information is freely available to king five and to os and to the workers themselves there's no inquiry going on at the site because they don't want to know they've never wanted to know as far as i can tell so it's a very frustrating situation you know for workers especially people who have to work there these are good paying jobs they don't want to give them up on the other hand you don't want to get an exposure that's going to kill you down the road so why isn't the state intervening in this for instance the head of the state labor industries said she's not seen as many people needing medical attention for a reoccurring circumstance in her career with the state of washington and she's been there like twenty eight years so she clearly thinks there's a problem there well there's a lot of people who think that and my organization hamper challenge has written a letter to the attorney general of the state of washington bob her reason we wrote this letter in april we pointed out that the state has authority to protect workers at hanford site under the hazardous waste laws we wrote this letter is a fourteen page letter single spaced like a legal brief because we're we're attorneys and we did a lot of research and put a lot of work into this and we wrote it like that because we wanted to show  e the chief legal officer for the state of washington that he had a solid basis for moving forward to actually utilize authority to protect hanford workers because in their state of washington citizens because deo either depart of energy and hanford as has shown an unwillingness over the last twenty five years to take effective action now it's not to say they haven't taken any action but they know the action has prevented these exposures from happening so we subsequently did have a meeting with two of the staff attorneys assigned to the hanford site and from the attorney general's office it was a very good meeting and they they kind of citizen message that the attorney general was going to take this very seriously that this was a serious issue to the governor and to the attorney general ann kind of hinted that there needed to be some  pressure so we started a petition on change dot org we're getting other organizations to write unions etc to write to the attorney general's office and if anyone who's listening to this cares about this you can go to our website challenge dot award she and there's a petition on there there's a link to a petition on change dot org that you can sign just electronically that would go quickly and automatically to the attorney general we are considering other legal steps that we could take under citizen supervisions we've been talking to members of our members of congress from the state of washington adam smith who's representative  and both senators of course maria cantwell and patty murray we haven't gotten that far with them they say the right things they say they care there's no action coming out of those quarters adam smith has been the most active on it he's actually talked to a bunch of folks at department of labor at osha you know at the department of energy and where we're trying to get him to also expanded talk to doctors  and workers who have been hurt etc because essentially they're they're blowing smoke and he's being told a load of crap that he needs to examine the veracity of so right now he's taking a wait and see attitude he's like well it looks like they're protecting workers gee where do you get that right because every week there's a new set of workers being hurt and you know they're banking on this so called independent study which is actually another contractor under the control of the department of energy has been brought into the do this study at hanford so we don't call that independent we call that you know a captured  obviously your customer is going to please you so the depart of energy is going to expect to get a result so whatever the department of energy watts is going to get from this study and they won't cross certain lines so that study is we don't give it much hope and we don't think it's that necessary we think it's necessary that they take action the kind of action that needs to be taken is they need to put scrubbers on these tanks scrubbers you might have heard that term used in connection with coal plants right so coal plants you know that emit very dangerous pollutants to the environment the coal dust and the vapors coming out of that go through in modern plants a set of scrubbers that capture those those vapors the same thing can happen at the hanford site there's chemical vapor scrubbers and again they're expensive and troublesome so that the site doesn't want to use them  but every other modern chemical facility out there does and we're urging that the attorney general step in and regulate this site like any other site united states it needs external regulation the department of energy has a conflict of interest when it decides what money to spend to have production goals versus protecting workers and the workers often get short shrift and usually get short shrift and they're not being protected now that means we need outside protection we need we need a regulator from the outside and yeah i'd like to see wisha in their wish to is the washington industrial safety health administration and they regulate health and safety matters in the state of washington but not at hanford can change is a regulatory change that can be made and i'd like to see the governor insist on that and i'd like to see our own congressional delegation insist on that when the initial tank leaks the latest tank lea hit the news governor inslee at least in public seem to respond to that do you have any indication that he is going to do anything concrete towards that issue yes on march thirty first the governor governor inslee and bob ferguson the attorney general held a press conference of this year and announced a series of initiatives towards hanford that  were very concrete and nature and the first thing they did was issue what's called it administrative order and any time a polluter is engaged in some act that is contrary to the law then the regulator in this case the state of washington and issue in administrative order that says you will do such and such and then on this timeline and tell us how you're doing or you'll be subject to civil penalties and possibly criminal penalties so the order can be appealed but while it's being appealed it still is in effect and in this case the order was that hanford was required department of energy has shown no willingness or interest in pompey nor remediating that tank but they're waiting for it to fail so that it actually hits the environment and then they'll take action that's exactly what they have said they've basically because it's you know they'll run it's a failure that's a common term at hanford it's like well it's too late then because the stuff gets into the soil and how you going to get it out of the soil underneath this you know million ton monolith right you guys move the tank out  this there's been a million gallons leaked into the soil this way so we're very appreciative of the fact that the the governor and the attorney general have taken very strong action very specific requirements imposed upon on the department of energy and hanford to deal with this tank but they went beyond that they also put there also seeking to change what's called a consent decree and the way clean up happens at hanford right now is that there's there's a decree so consent decree means that you can go to court straight to court when someone fails to meet a deadline and the judge can take matters into you know his or her hands at that point start issuing penalties and motivate and maybe send someone to jail motivate them to take that action as agreed so right now the state is slowly putting in some very important cleanup goals and deadlines that probably should have been a consent decree in the first place  into that form while the department of energy is going crazy over that they've they issued their own proposed consent decree and the difference between the two documents we consent decree proposal in the states is like night and day the deal we says is you know a handful of pages and it says essentially some day somehow maybe we'll get some clean up going to hanford it will tell you when in the state is the states is ok want it comes to the single shell tanks you'll have eight of those empty by twenty eighteen you'll have you know sixteen empty by twenty twenty two you have the waste treatment plants these issues dealt with y have direct treatment for this and accountability requirements you know your report every three weeks you'll do this you'll do that in his wow the states started their like a regulator out there it's they woke up in our green governor actually started to live up to his credentials and kudos to him for doing that now the trick is to make sure they don't cave because there's tremendous counter pressure from of course rich contractors the federal government and even the tri cities itself that doesn't want too much regulation they're afraid it'll it'll hurt the economy out there and they're a very powerful voice you know in some cases to not  not have that kind of regulation don't get me wrong the tri cities communities really want clean up to happen out there they're some of the strongest voices for environmental cleanup they live there but there are contractors and others that you know are too busy making money to actually want to have to live up to the law and the course the federal government doesn't want to spend the money to to do the cleanup it accountable accountable way but they really need that accountability just a couple minutes left can you give us an update on the vitrification plant it's stalled i think last time we were talking they were in the process of firing a number of whistleblowers the top echelon of their technical staff the director of the manager of nuclear safety the manager of research and technology the chief engineer the chief scientist all those people have become whistleblowers because of the design problems with this plant now this is a plant that's supposed to be taking the waste from the tanks and mixing that with glass the glass cools and that waste is now in the glass matrix and it's a good idea it's just that it's an expensive idea and hasn't they haven't been able to accomplish this facility getting this facility up and going so the whistleblowers have been pointing out some very unhappy design problems very much along the lines of what happened you know preventable accidents that like what happened in japan in terms of hydrogen gas explosions and nuclear critic callan sees because it is sinus is simply insufficient and the construction of the plant was careless and apt in mismanaged so nuclear safety laws were not obeyed and that in the contractor has essentially been a fit it handsomely from this from a an estimated forty four billion dollars to build it that was the estimate back in two thousand to now  over thirteen billion and probably it's going to cost twenty five to thirty billion before it's all done every step along the way the contractors back to your ass are just raking in the money because they have to keep rebuilding it and changing the design and et c and the department of energy's response to all this is to be more collaborative with this is documented in a deal we report that came out more collaborative with the contractor this week and be nice to them and maybe they'll be better to us like wow really anyway so the way street appliance in big trouble we don't see that is probably going to work and they need to look at a plan b and with that we're out of time on it thank you very much for coming and spending time with us again this morning thanks mike we are talking today with dr bill thomas dr bill thomas it is an international authority on geriatric medicine and elder care while pursuing a career in emergency medicine a part time position as the medical director of a small rural nursing home turned into a full time and lifelong passion for improving the wellbeing of older people in the early one nine hundred ninety s he and his wife judith myers thomas developed the eden alternative in two thousand and one he founded the green house project a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating alternative living environments to traditional nursing home care facilities and he is the author of several books including what are the old people for how elders will save the world life worth living how someone you love can still enjoy life in a nursing home the alternative in action and his latest book second wind navigating the passage to a slower deeper and more connected life bill thank you very much for coming as been a time with us and thanks for inviting me so you are in seattle as part of your second wind to talk about that yeah actually it's a pretty interesting fun to exercise in the use of theater kind of communicate ideas were we were in seattle as part of a twenty five city tour where we're performing to act non theater sees me non fiction theater experience in cities around the country and a lot of people have been asking me you know why why are you doing that and actually i think we're at the beginning of a whole new phase of a whole  understanding of life experience and community theater and it's going to expand and the uses of theater so we put together the show and we're going to be performing all week on the west coast and from there on to the rest of the country so pretty aggressive tour it sounds like yeah well yeah so we live on a tour bus there the cast and crew we have a rock  roll tour bus that was sleep on and we get into a city in the morning and fan out and kind of communicate with people and talk and share our ideas about aging and society and imagination and then we put the show on the show in the afternoon one to four thirty and then when you strike the sets load the bus grab a bite to eat and ride to the next city and do it all over again so it's really something like something like a rock n roll tour with a different message a different intention so how would you describe nonfiction theater well it's really the idea of using stage craft a lot of people are accustomed to nonfiction information coming to them live in very boring ways a lot of us have many hours of experience listening to a professor drone or watching a powerpoint presentation and in fact you can make  introduction of new ideas new facts new insights you can use stagecraft and theater and sets and costumes and design you can use all those things to create an experience where people get all the ideas but experience them in a much more robust authentic and emotional way and you find that stays with people more oh yeah i really do i mean i you know i've  taught medical students for twenty years and you know i've done my share of lecturing and all that but this is people are coming out of the theater at the end of the performance going wow wow wow cast members in the lobby giving people sort of hand cream and face cream to try for sense and touch and sense of smell and then inside the theater we've created sets that are have really rich saturated colors as music there is the spoken word personal monologues from people and there's film and there's music all part of a single experience and i think this is something that i actually think our culture and our society is going to gradually wake up to that you just can't stand there and talk to people i mean you have to give them a sense of connection and are you courage ing them once they've experienced this in ace to to participate in an action after this yeah actually the action you know  the theater production we're doing has two acts and at the end of the show i say act three begins outside those doors act three you are the actor it's your life go reimagine  it one of the things that i've been really eager to do is to connect our audiences after the show connect them with kind of the tools and resources they need to reimagine their own life and that the kind of this is one of those flags on the hill type thing one of the things that's so important to me about this tour and the experience we're giving people is that i'm of devout believer in the idea that we grow all the way across our lifespan that aging is a growth experience and it's a time for enriching and livening connectedness and our culture of course i giving us the exact opposite message that you know as you get older you lose your declining singhs become worse for you as you get older and we're challenging that edges them right out straight out so how did you get involved what was your motivation in starting to pursue these ideas with respect for our elders  one day completely by chance and for no good reason a local nursing home administrator offered me a part time job and i figured if i took this part time job i could give up one night shift in those days we used to work twenty four hours straight shifts and i thought wow you know i take this job i can let go one of those nights can be good and my honestly i just fell in love i mean i got there and i thought it was just going to be nothing but i fell in love with the elders and the people telling love of the people who work there and i'm i discovered the reason i was on the planet you know was to do my best to give voice to people who did not have a voice and in our culture one important voiceless group are frail older people and so how did you go about your first project was the the alternative yeah so i i i was at work one day at the nursing home and i was called to see a woman about a rash on her arm which you know pretty routine thing and i went to see her and i talked to her and i looked at the rash i knew what it was i knew what to give or i'm getting ready to excuse myself and this very old woman took a hold of my arm like she was lying in bed she reached up and grabbed my arm and pulled me down and actually for the first time i looked into  and she just said to me in this very soft voice i'm so lonely and the words just staggered me because here i was a well trained well prepared physician i could definitely help the rash on her arm but i was powerless to do anything about her loneliness and if you looked at what was causing more suffering it was the loneliness not the rush on the arm and so i started coming into the nursing home in those days and just sitting for hours at a stretch and not moving just starting to experience the environment the way elders experience it and i became convinced that not only was there loneliness there was also helplessness and boredom and that these three plagues were killing people so together with my wife jude we created this reform movement in long term care called the eden alternative it's basically a very simple idea life's better in this movement that was bringing children and plants and animals and laughter and love in to long term care and spread not just across the country but around the world  became a global nonprofit education organization called turn it up and is that something that a lot of facilities picked up or i would say i would say we have influenced thousands of nursing homes the trouble we have is that there are more nursing homes in america than there are starbucks coffee shops and telling you that right here in seattle that there are more nursing homes than mcdonald's restaurants and it's a very large very powerful industry and  i very proud of our work in no way can i say that i have overturned the status quo in long term care and i have a long way to go for that and i'm grateful for the opportunity to talk to your listeners about it because the number one thing that impedes change is people believing there's just no alternative there's no other option there's no other way and happy to share that message with people and encourage them to advocate for change because it is possible so clarify for me the bulk of long term care facilities for our elders is that primarily run by  industry you know you asked a couple of companies that well no it's actually pretty fragmented there are some big companies but there it will be thousands and thousands of smaller companies that run long term care many of which are nonprofit  there aren't really that there isn't really that big a difference between for profit or nonprofit but they are stuck in a twentieth century or really nineteenth century vision of what it means to provide for older people really based on custodianship and food and water hygiene rather than thinking about the person so we have a we have a big challenge ahead of us to do this and although it's not popular for some people i'm definitely known as a nursing home abolitionist and i really believe that our nation can create approaches to care that will ultimately make the nursing home obsolete and we'll look back on that part of history and go elsewhere but what were you thinking so is that where your greenhouse project comes in yeah actually so in the early two thousands i got to thinking about how old nursing home buildings are now i know a lot of you don't spend time thinking about but if you if you're in the field and keep your eyes open you realize a lot of these buildings were built in the sixty's and seventy's and i realized a great opportunity to change long term care is to take a decrepit old building replace it with a new model and close the old building so the green house is is a way of closing a nursing home and replacing it with small residences where people live their community based noninstitutional i like to say one word greenhouse grows plants a two word greenhouse that's our that's us gross people and that model has really spread across the country i think when twenty seven states now and we have a real commitment to having green houses in all fifty states and using it as an example of what kind of change is possible and can you do that at similar cost to what the traditional facilities are exactly the same cost and the reason i say that because in america if you come up with a great new approach for caring for older people and it costs one penny more happening the trick to being a revolutionary in the field is you have to come up with better outcomes that don't cost one penny more and that both eden alternative and the green house passed that test that don't cost more money they're just a different you know we we are merry band of change agents and we love sharing our work love give bringing hope to people it's kind of what we do so it's fun so you've been doing this for quite a while do you have a sense for why in this country we have essentially a band in our concept of knowledge to expert in aging i gradually come to understand that the problem in america is not aging the problem is adulthood we are living inside a malignant enlargement of adulthood and what has happened is the post war baby boom generation has actually remade adulthood hyper caffeinated it may have active hyper materialistic and we're all living inside it and it's hard to see and a lot of the loss of standing older people is due to the fact that older people in our culture are compared almost exclusively to their younger selves and they're held to be honorable only when they resemble their younger self either in a physical appearance or activity or work war and any deviation from that is punished in our society sometimes quite severely so we live in a society that's obsessed with youth obsessed with the virtues that are associated with youth and that has almost completely lost contact with the virtues of age in fact just let me just say that sentence the virtues of age and wonder like transmitters not exploding you know american culture has a very hard time even conceiving of this so this tour in the book second wind really is not about advice for older people it's a vice from older people it's about how do we learn the lessons of old age and bring them forward into adulthood to try to get a handle on how to live in a new way in adulthood in a society that's gone mad has gone insane basically so what are some of these messages that elders are pretty simple i got you know i've spent a lot of years in the company of very old people and i find if you pay attention any a listen they have a couple of things to say first slow down and again you know that the transmitter is sparking and you know slow down i don't do not that does not compute actually we can and should live slower lives and for human beings compared to the way we live now slower is better and if just even take a little time to look around you can find these slow movements around the world they're slow food slow cities slow money there's even slow television there are all these movements toward slowness and yet what i'm really saying is slow is a virtue slow is good we need slowness in our life and when aging when we experience aging one of the things we can experience if we open ourselves up to it is living more slowly and that that can open up new avenues of insight new avenues of understanding and you avenues to wisdom and so i'm advocating for slow and even in the second when performance we have a explicit call to the audience at one point to slow down oh down it's going to be all right so slows one important thing the other thing is getting beneath the surface of things going deep  older people have often lose their tolerance for superficial appearances they're very interested in authenticity and the experience of understanding life  as it really is not everyone but it's frequent and that's a virtue we could do well to import into adulthood we could do very well to say i'm not going to content myself with a shiny surface i'm going to go deeper the third thing that i write about and that is part of the show is connecting with each other aging is a team sport you try to play by yourself you lose you have to have that connection you have to be connected to have a worthy elder hood to have a place in our society and when elders segregate themselves and are or are segregated and are cut off from the rest of us we suffer in addition to their suffering and by connected you're not talking about through our electronic devices well that's possible but and you know i know people we can feel connected people if we get to know them over time on the radio for example i mean there are other ways but certainly face to face connections are pretty darn valuable i'm not sure you know just liking your grand kids facebook posts probably not adequate but being relied upon and relying on others being cherished and cherishing others being loved and loving others these things are ve more important in age than they are in us this trend is it a relatively recent trend here in the us are turning our backs on  elders yes and no the real big changes all came after world war two before world war two by and large americans employed what we called traditional forms of caregiving where people  in families took care of each other which was an awesome and great system if you had a great daughter in law and if you had a mean daughter in law could be very so after world war two we began to think more seriously about how do we how do we do this in american society we're not that old the traditional little farming community was becoming less important in a mobile urban society was becoming more important and we arranged in america we arranged a shotgun marriage between a poorhouse and a hospital and the offspring was the nursing home and it's been now about a fifty year fifty year experiment and it hasn't worked so it's time for something new so how do we in our communities then take the next step well i think actually the answer to taking the next step is beginning with yourself i i find that in my experience it's the power of re imagination in your own life that opens the door to all these other things just in the context of our little conversation you know i had the good fortune sort of being able to reimagine my life i was an e r doctor and i was able to reimagine my own future and here i am now on a tour across them even though i'm a trained physician performing on stage in a nonfiction theater national tour that's reimagine ation and i feel that social change in many times especially in the context of prejudice and bias and we're talking about ageism here cultural changed moves at the rate of personal change people people have to wake up to the degree that they're trapped inside this narrative of diminishing possibilities this story of loss of opportunities all you're not as young as you used to be you're over the hill we have a whole language senior moments we have a whole language and construct that locks people into a very narrow band and said well if you if you can still do this and you can still do that then you're worthy and good but if you can't then you fall off the edge of the world and i think that this idea of reimagine nation belongs to us our whole life long and a big part of why i'm doing what i'm doing is to create a connection for people to the power of reimagine nation and to help them search for new possibilities in their lives and if that theater tour and the book do that then i'll be very happy men because that's really in essence the purpose of my life at this time and it's to widen this conversation elders give you a couple of pieces of language that are useful to me there are a large number of older people in america but what we need are people who can outgrow adulthood but we need people who have out grown the suffocating limitations of adulthood and have broadened out and reached out and become elders of their community so we have lots of older people not enough elders we're going to need over the next ten to fifteen years sixty to seventy million people to grow adulthood and the trouble is they don't even know that you can they don't even know that you should just again the phrase outgrowing adulthood doesn't seem right in american english but in fact there's a life phase on the far side of adulthood and it's very rich and liberating and wise and gentle and in many ways so different in adulthood it's called elder hood and we need to help people reach for it to grab stretch for it to grow into it so that we can have a healthy society that's the piece that's missing we have lots of aging people no problem got that covered check it's getting those people out of adulthood and in delta hood that's the challenge well with that we're out of time on it thank you very much for spending time with us today