Who knew that those words would be the last I would ever say to my students in a classroom?

After that final class on Friday, March 13, my high school in Glendale, like other schools, would close and never reopen. We would finish out the Spring, 11 weeks of it, via distance learning.

That meant no graduation ceremonies for seniors. And for me—another type of senior, 55 work days shy of retiring from teaching—that meant no retirement parties, and no celebratory moments of saying final goodbyes to colleagues and students. All of it deleted before it could materialize. A black hole.

I had no time for self-pity in March because I quickly had to re-learn how to teach, now in a virtual classroom environment. I had been teaching English and journalism at Herbert Hoover High School in Glendale since 1989 in a traditional classroom setting, and now I was about to embark on a journey I didn’t know I was going to take.

And neither did school officials who were unprepared for such a moment. They were scrambling to train teachers on online platforms, while distributing laptops and Wi-Fi hot spots to students who needed them—all in a week’s time.

I found it terrifying yet thrilling and after viewing a few webinars that the district provided, I got excited. Not so much about the tools themselves, but the fact that the district allowed teachers to choose how to teach and which tools to use.

It was something I had never experienced before in my 31 years of teaching—the district entrusting teachers with selecting the best way to teach, not mandating one method for all.

During the school year I taught five classes: four advanced 10th grade English and one journalism. Using Google Classroom, I consolidated the four English classes into one for easier workflow management. Why upload the same lesson four times in four different “classrooms”?

Knowing that the very first day of distance learning would feel foreign, I wanted to soothe my students’ nerves with a video of me talking directly to them, reprising a song I sang to them on the very first day of the school year back in August.

My inspiration was Fred Rogers. Instead of rules, we discuss expectations. Instead of penalties, we discuss rewards. Instead of a classroom, we have a neighborhood.

I sang “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” with altered lyrics such as “it’s a beautiful day in this classroom now.”

With Mr. Crosby’s Neighborhood premiering on March 30, I would sing it again on video, for this would be the second First Day of the school year.

Once students viewed the video, dozens emailed me about how much they liked it, that it gave them comfort at a time when they were troubled with what was going on in the world.

The reaction motivated me to create more videos, and I couldn’t wait to pursue this new form of teaching which allowed my creativity to flourish.

And then reality settled in.

Distance learning was exactly like its name: distant.

While most of my English students submitted work and responded to my emails, one-third of my journalism staff disappeared. No submissions, no responses, no pulse, as if they were suddenly in a witness protection program. Struggling students no longer fall through the cracks; they have found an online hiding place, never to resurface.

What’s more, Google Meet and Zoom are not substitutes for in-person teaching. Classroom discussions, literature tests, and group projects could not be replicated online. There was no way for a teacher to know with certainty if the work done by the student was original, performed without the assistance of any person or source.

How could I give students a test? I couldn’t. Students could share responses.

How could I assign students an essay? I couldn’t. Most of the papers students write for me are done in class to ensure their veracity. Not now.

Courtesy of Brian Crosby.

Even ordinary lessons normally completed neatly within one class period drag on for a whole week; it’s like working in slow-motion.

For example, here is how a lesson from my Holocaust unit would play out in a regular classroom. Usually I show students a video of Auschwitz survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon returning to the concentration camp. For 47 painful minutes, she describes in excruciating detail the horror of what she experienced.

Before I show the video, I share her biography so they have familiarity with her background. Then I pass out a viewing guide that focuses on significant moments of the video.

I project the video onto a large screen with Bose speakers, an immersive moviegoing experience that all 34 students share collectively.

Midway through I pause the video and have them pair up with a partner and discuss answers to the questions. We then have a whole class discussion. After that, we review the next set of questions and resume the video.

By the end of day two, the lesson concludes with a short piece of writing in which students reflect on the video and make connections to Elie Wiesel’s Night, the memoir they just finished reading.

Compare this to the virtual classroom version of the same lesson.

On Monday, I post the notes, video and questions all at once, giving them two days to complete the assignment. Students are on their own to read the materials and watch the video.

There is no way for me to know if students are reading the material or watching the video. A teacher in the online environment has to proceed with an abundance of faith.

I cannot control when they do this or the speed at which they do this. Viewing the film on a laptop or cell phone in the comfort of a student’s home diminishes the impact, with the students starting and stopping the video as they please. It is no longer the emotional experience they would have had in my classroom.

Wednesday, I review all 112 student answers to the 16 questions. In person, we would have spent 10 minutes for students to share with a partner, then 10 minutes of sharing with the whole class, thus completing the task. Now, I have to actually read 112 written responses and select parts of them to share with students so they can broaden their perspective by hearing from their peers. The result: the whole thing takes too long and is lifeless.

Thursday, I post those select responses and ask students to comment on them to emulate conversation.

Again, in a classroom, this give-and-take would have energy, excitement, emotions running high, maybe erupt into an informal debate—a lesson impossible to orchestrate online.

Friday, I finally post their comments on what their peers had to say.

Online, the lesson dissolves into a lackluster exercise.

Within two weeks of teaching this way, I realized that the main ingredient missing was live performance. When students and teachers congregate in a classroom, together they give life to a lesson. Without sharing the physical space, that energy is unplugged. An electric group learning experience disintegrates into a dim “do your own thing” keyboard task. We all end up working alone in the dark.

Teaching in isolation from a laptop via distance learning was not the job that I had grown to love over three decades.

If I had any urge to change my mind and come back to work another year, distance learning confirmed that I had made the right choice. Schools will not be normal come August, most likely returning with a hybrid of in-class and virtual time.

That’s not for me.

I’m lucky in a way that this happened to me now when I was already on my way out. I feel for my colleagues who remain. It’s not going to be fun.

The post After 11 Weeks of ‘Distance Learning,’ This Teacher Is Glad to Be Retiring appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If we can’t get rid of the California Rule, can we at least ditch the name?

The California Rule is the misleading moniker we’ve given to our state’s most troublesome legal precedent: that public employees are entitled to whatever pension benefits were in place when they started work. Pension benefits in California are so monumental that they might as well be set in the stone of El Capitan—they can never be cut, unless they are replaced with another benefit of equal value.

You can say that such an ironclad guarantee is good for public workers. But you can’t say that it’s Californian. In virtually every other context of life here, our state is defined by its lack of guarantees. The California Rule on pensions is really the California Exception.

For all its wonders, California is a place where you can count on almost nothing—not even the ground beneath you will stand still. As the American essayist and anarchist Edward Abbey once observed, “There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.”

While the Golden State is famous for producing myriad regulations and laws, the complexity and overwhelming number of such rules mean that there are few clear rules to follow. The California Rule itself has contributed to this problem. By requiring always-escalating retirement benefits that force cuts in essential public services, the California Rule has effectively made a lie out of every significant guarantee in the state constitution, from balanced budgets to speedy trials, to our children’s right to a properly funded education.

Like Snoop Dogg and Billie Jean King, the California Rule was born in Long Beach. In 1951, the city government there tried to reduce the pensions of police officers and firefighters while also making them contribute much more to their pension fund. Four years later, the California Supreme Court declared that unconstitutional.

The California Rule has been constructed on top of that precedent in the decades since, as state courts have turned down other plans to alter public pensions.

The California Rule got its name because most of the rest of America doesn’t follow it. In other, saner places, only pension benefits already earned, by the work people have actually done, are protected. But California is one of only 12 states that have protected the right to earn future pension benefits for work not yet performed. In other words, whatever benefits were in place on the date you were hired, you get to retain forever; employers who want to reduce some benefits must replace them with new benefits of the same value or greater.

The pension benefits protected by the California Rule have become increasingly outsized and fiscally damaging in recent decades, as public employee unions have become the state’s most powerful interests.

Proposition 13 also interacted with the California Rule in dangerous ways, creating perverse incentives for local government officials to make unsustainably large pension promises to their employees.

California’s killer combination of escalating retirement benefits and limits on taxation help explain why the state’s schools are underfunded, university tuition fees are ever rising, health and welfare programs fall short of need, courts can’t produce timely justice, and prisons are perennially overcrowded.

In these and other ways, the California Rule violates the state constitution’s most basic promises of self-government. The rule mocks the people’s right to information—since true pension costs have long been hidden by laws and accounting practices. And it even abrogates the constitutional requirement that California’s people are sovereign under our direct democracy. Citizens in San Jose and San Diego have voted to save their public services by altering pensions, only to be told by the courts that the California Rule matters more than their ballots.

The rule also reduces even our most well-intentioned leaders to liars; they may talk about the need to embrace sustainability and fight inequality, but they are powerless to change the state’s most unsustainable and unequal rule.

Politicians often ask us to protect services with tax increases, but, because of the California Rule, nearly every significant local or state tax increase of the past two decades has partly gone towards rising retirement costs.

The California Rule has been in the news recently for two reasons. First, teachers’ strikes in Oakland and Los Angeles have spotlighted how rising pension costs for retirees are consuming money that should go to compensating today’s teachers. Second, the California Supreme Court has begun looking at legal cases that challenge some pension benefits—including the California Rule itself.

Former Gov. Jerry Brown, who appointed four of the seven justices, has predicted that the rule might be done away with. But don’t bet on it.

I attended the court’s hearing of the first such case (in a surprisingly empty courtroom given the stakes), and the justices, when they questioned the lawyers, poked every conceivable hole in the rule. The justices also had a road map to overturning the California Rule: a smart and brave opinion from a state appeals court that found public employees are only really guaranteed a “reasonable” pension, not the ever-escalating ones provided by the California Rule.

But when it came time to make a ruling, the justices chickened out, leaving the California Rule itself in place.

If the high court doesn’t find some courage and overturn it, the California Rule will result in statewide disaster. At best, this will be a steady, decades-long degrading of services, as more and more tax dollars that should go to today’s citizens is diverted to cover the retirements of former workers.

Worst case, a big recession or a huge stock market decline could combine with the California Rule to create an epic fiscal calamity. With pension funds falling short, cash-strapped governments would have to put even more money into shoring up retirement benefits as required by the California Rule, leaving little money for anything else. Hundreds of schools would close, local governments would go bankrupt, and new taxes and budget cuts to cover funding gaps would further undermine the economy. The public could erupt in fury at pensions and even pensioners, and some governments might dare to abandon payments to pensions funds, putting the public retirement system at risk.

Let’s end the California Rule now before a full-blown crisis hits so that a more flexible, resilient, and less costly system of retirement can be developed, because self-inflicted disaster should be the exception, not the rule, in California.

The post Why California’s Pensions Only Deepen Inequality appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Each of these first two chapters of boomers’ lives (while allowing for other ethnic, gender, and socio-economic determinants) forms a relatively straightforward narrative that, in many ways, was quite representative of previous generations of Americans. Declaring independence from one’s parents and their respective values in an attempt to create something different actually goes back a couple of centuries in this country, as does the subsequent settling into the domesticity and maturity of midlife.

This is, however, where it gets interesting. Rather than embrace their parents’ model of seniority defined by retirement, baby boomers are now considering or pursuing many different options, a version of life I call Boomers 3.0. Instead of heading en masse to retirement communities much like “Del Boca Vista” (the fictional condominium complex in Florida of Seinfeld fame), 60-somethings are going back to school, starting new relationships, exploring their creativity, taking new spiritual paths, embarking on “encore” careers, forming new communities, fighting for causes in which they believe, giving their time and money away, and yes, bucket listing. For financial and other reasons, a good number are working and staying in their current homes as long as possible, seeing no compelling reason to do otherwise.

Much is being made about how many baby boomers are financially unprepared for retirement, something all too true for a sizable segment of their generation. But boomers are collectively the richest generation in history and, even though a good number have already scaled back their careers, they are getting still richer. The (currently) strong stock market is making affluent boomers wealthier, with those additional financial resources being used to pursue alternative, sometimes very costly third acts.

Sixty-five million (of the original 76 million) in the boomer population are still alive and kicking. They range in age from 53 to 71, and each one is approaching or already engaged in his or her third act. Some baby boomers, unwilling or unable to accept that their bodies and minds have gotten older, are clinging desperately to their remaining youth by investing in the wide array of “anti-aging” therapies to be found in the marketplace. But even most of these folks don’t take these alleged fountains of youth too seriously.

Still other boomers are admittedly lost when it comes to planning for their third act; they are not interested in the traditional model of retirement, but not at all clear on which path they should take. Interestingly, in my research I’ve found that it is the financially secure who are most likely to be directionless, a result perhaps of having too many options available.

What happened to the very pleasant idea of spending one’s third and final act of life enjoying what one had worked so hard and long for during the first and second acts? Why is there no longer a central narrative to Americans’ last quarter-century or so of life (roughly age 55 to 80, on average)—replaced by a postmodern jumble of stories going in all sorts of directions? Are baby boomers, as some observers have claimed, the first “ageless” generation in history, rejecting the rules of society as they famously did in their idealistic younger days? Is creating a new paradigm of aging their final hurrah, something perhaps greater in scope and longer-lasting than their countercultural dream of universal peace and love?

In retrospect, the baby boomers’ impulse to toss out the Greatest Generation’s interpretation of older age makes perfect sense and was entirely predictable. Boomers (the “Me Generation,” remember) were and remain resistant to social norms and expectations, their individualism and anti-authoritarian ways perhaps being their most enduring legacy. It would be easy to suggest that as boomers plunge headfirst into their 70s they are suffering from an acute case of Peter Pan syndrome, refusing to grow up even as their physical selves experience decline and as they more often forget exactly why they came into a room. The looming threat of becoming a victim of Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia is incentive enough to pretend that older age is something that only happens to other people.

Overall, however, I believe that baby boomers’ inclination to take on new challenges and “act young” later in life is a very good thing. Studies show that there is much truth to the cliché, however trite, that one’s age is “just a number” or a “state of mind,” and that one is “only as old as one feels.” (Don’t even get me started on the “70 is the new 50” adage, or other such silly twistings of chronology, not to mention basic biology.) But sitting down to dinner at an “early bird special” to save a couple bucks, or whiling away afternoons playing mahjong, are simply not boomers’ style. (To be fair, retirement communities are a lot more active than they used to be.) Boomers’ third acts of life may indeed be scattered, disjointed, and personally defined, but as a whole they offer an attractive alternative to the going-off-into-the-sunset model that was so popular in the latter half of the 20th century.

Finally, given the widespread ageism in our youth-obsessed society, it’s no surprise that baby boomers will do pretty much anything to avoid being branded as irrelevant and over the hill. It’s also important to note that boomers’ insistence on trying to keep their jobs despite lucrative early retirement offers is actually in the best interests of the country. Millennials may wish boomers would get out of the way so they could take over their prestigious jobs and fat salaries, but millions of 60-somethings delaying Social Security and Medicare payouts is, for the moment at least, averting the economic and healthcare apocalypse (and “generational war” over resources) that many experts are predicting.

Continuing to find meaning and purpose in life is the real goal of Boomers 3.0—a less coherent story than version 1.0 or 2.0, but certainly an intriguing one that will have major social, economic, and political consequences over the next few decades.

The post Why Boomers Need a New Script for Life’s Third Act appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If only more Californians could retire like Vin.

Vin Scully, that is. The Hall of Fame announcer for the Los Angeles Dodgers will call his last game this Sunday, October 2, a month shy of his 89th birthday. That retirement has touched off a national celebration of Scully’s announcing mastery, his storytelling methods, and his many contributions to baseball through 67 years with the Dodgers.

But what deserves even more attention—including from Californians who couldn’t care less about sports—is the smart, progressive way he planned his retirement.

In this country, retirements are often abrupt. People depart the workforce suddenly and at a time decided by numbers—a company rule, a buyout, Social Security calculations, or retirement benefit formulas—not what’s best for retirees or the workplaces they’re leaving. Formula-driven retirement is standard in California’s public sector, where pension rules sometimes push people to retire earlier.

Scully’s retirement, by contrast, was anything but abrupt. He phased in his departure over two decades. Back in the mid 1990s, as he approached the age of 70, Scully—who in his prime announced not just Dodger games but also national football, baseball, and golf—pared back his duties. He focused solely on baseball, then dropped national broadcasting. Then, a decade ago, he gradually reduced his Dodger obligations, mostly by progressively limiting his travel (first he stopped going to the East Coast, then he stayed west of the Rockies, then he limited himself to games in California). In his final year, he worked home games almost exclusively.

Describing this long, slow phase-out, Scully once said, “I would like to disappear like the Cheshire Cat, where [at the end] the only thing left is a smile.”

The Cheshire Cat Strategy has been a success. Scully has remained robust, his sharp, wide-ranging observations carrying nine innings of a game—solo—with characteristic ease. (Other, younger baseball announcers typically have on-air partners and work only some of the innings).

This super-longevity has huge value to the Dodgers and their fans. The myriad tributes to him these days, as he retires, emphasize how his knowledge and long memory have made him a back-office resource to the nation’s second most-valuable baseball team. And fans treasure how he’s connected them and their families across more than three generations; Angelenos have been writing letters and Facebook posts about how their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents all shared the experience of listening to Scully.

Could Scully’s phased retirement be a model for other Californians? The question might seem daft. After all, this state famously thinks little about its older citizens (Scully is a special case), preferring to celebrate younger technologists and stars who “innovate” or “disrupt” or “invent” the new. And retirement has become one of California’s nastiest legal and political minefields, especially when the conversation turns to pensions and retiree health care for government workers. Some of us see robust pensions and retiree health care as underfunded, expensive indulgences and a form of inter-generational theft, with the old robbing the young. Others see any attempt to reform pensions as a scheme to impoverish workers. The two sides have been fighting bitterly via ballot initiatives and litigation for decades.

These retirement wars leave little room for a conversation about how we might make the so-called golden years better for all of us—for retirees, for businesses, for governments. But that’s precisely the conversation California needs to have.

Our state is rapidly aging; the number of people 65 and older is projected to nearly double by 2030. At the same time, immigration is flat, and our birth rate has fallen below the level needed to replace the population. So California urgently needs to find ways to coax more productivity out of its most senior citizens.

Instead, we watch as valuable baby boomer workers retire, leaving huge voids of knowledge and skill that can’t easily be filled. Government agencies in particular are finding it hard to hire and retain replacements for retirees who had specialized knowledge and high-level financial and technical skills. New hires too often leave after they’re trained, because they can make more money in the private sector.

Part of the answer to this problem lies in Scully’s example: we must make it possible for valuable workers to stick around into late old age. The popularity of Gov. Jerry Brown, who will be 80 when he leaves office in 2018, suggests there is some public appreciation for having senior citizens work long past retirement age. (Brown himself likes to joke about the fiscal benefits of long-serving full-time workers; our pension system would be fully funded, the governor jokes, “if everybody in state service worked as long as I have.”)

But Brown, who is childless, has a life built around public service; it wouldn’t be a surprise to see him run for another public office, like controller, once he’s moved out of the governor’s mansion. For people with a broader array of family obligations, a phased retirement like Scully’s makes more sense. The central principle is flexibility: the ability to mix varying levels of work with life in a way that makes both better.

But our retirement and work systems aren’t agile enough. To the contrary, they’re highly complicated, so full of rules that designing a flexible schedule, while legally possible, can be more trouble than it’s worth. I know a number of state retirees who still work, but under very informal arrangements involving few hours of paid work, or even volunteering for agencies or officials they admire. Designing flexible and busier arrangements can bump up against the strict limit on the number of hours someone can work after entering the state’s CalPERS retirement system: 960 hours a year, or less than 20 hours a week. And those limited part-time options are often discouraged because, in the context of the pension wars, government officials fear accusations of permitting “double dipping.”

Legal scholars advise me that legislation would be needed to establish a new category for workers who want flexible, phased retirements in the public sector. So I hereby propose that California governments create the Vin Scully Phased Retirement Plan. When employees reach retirement age, they should be able to enter into a phased plan, subject to the approval of their supervisors, that could be altered by mutual agreement. The details could get complicated, but one goal of the Scully Plan would be to ensure that phased retirement neither hurt, nor spiked, the employee’s retirement benefits.

Phased retirements are hardly new. Smart businesses offer them, as do academia and the courts—just ask emeritus professors and senior-status judges. Why should a state that has paid employees for so long completely lose the benefit of their experience and knowledge?

The best argument for phased retirement is that it’s good for the retiree. Such connections to work and colleagues can keep older people’s minds sharp—and even help them live longer. Indeed, some research suggests that older people who work moderately—25 hours a week—are especially productive and creative.

“Hang in there,” is cliché, in sports and life. But it would represent real progress as a principle for reorganizing how we work late in life. “All I know,” Vin Scully recently said, “is I’m eternally grateful for having been allowed to work so many games.”

The post More Californians Should Retire Like Vin Scully appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Savings and assets—homes, cars, retirement funds—are launching pads to something better, even as they cushion against today’s inevitable emergencies. But for generations, policies to help families build the savings and assets they need to give their children a better life have created a persistent and widening gap in net worth between white families and African-American and Latino families.

As a country, we don’t like to talk about race. Our inequality conversations are often framed more generally, as the difference between the “1 percent” and the rest of us. But when nearly 70 percent of children living below the federal poverty line are non-whites—a rate much higher than the representation of nonwhite children in the overall U.S. population—it’s time to look honestly at the role race and ethnicity continue to play in the prospects of future generations.

A long and shameful pattern of discriminatory policies—from redlining by federal housing authorities to disparate access to the benefits of the GI Bill—have disadvantaged African-American and Latino families, among others, in developing savings and assets for generations. While those overtly discriminatory policies have been taken off the books, a legacy of different fates remains.

Between 2010 and 2013, for example, as the U.S. economy was climbing out of the Great Recession, the net worth of white families increased by 2 percent while black and Latino families saw their assets plummet by 34 percent and 15 percent, respectively. The gaps show African-American and Latino families face steep odds when it comes to building any kind of financial cushion, while white families are more likely to inherit a house or savings. A median white family is likely to have a month’s income in savings on hand for emergencies, while a median Latino family has only 12 days’ worth, and a median African-American family only five days’ worth.

Saving money isn’t easy—nearly half of Americans don’t have enough put away to handle even a $400 emergency. And the more a family depends on its income for daily subsistence, the less there is to put away. An unexpected bill or health crisis can be financially crippling to families operating on a thin margin. Poor families might not qualify for conventional loans and resort to payday lenders whose ready access comes at a high price. Predatory lending practices cost families $8.7 billion a year in interest and fees, perpetuating the cycle of poverty.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation, where I use my background as an economist to analyze and communicate data, recently released a brief with four practical policy recommendations to help all families build the savings and assets they need for their children to succeed. The Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University analyzed two of these policies at our request and found that both could reduce the racial wealth gap—one of them quite substantially.

One of these vehicles, the federal My Retirement Account program (known as myRA), was established in 2014 to allow workers who lacked vehicles for retirement savings through their employers to save up to $15,000 in a no-fee, government-backed starter retirement account. If participation were expanded and everyone eligible were to save the maximum, myRA could reduce the black-white wealth gap by 5 percent and the Latino-white gap by 7 percent, the analysis indicates. And because myRAs are funded with after-tax dollars, contributions can be available for emergencies without incurring tax penalties.

The other policy analyzed—a more ambitious, broad investment in children’s savings accounts—showed potential for the greatest social dividends. The recommendation was that federal funds seed accounts for every child born in the U.S., with larger deposits for infants in low-income families with minimal savings. At age 18, a young person could use the money for tuition or training, a business or a home. Countries from Singapore to the United Kingdom have already offered accounts like this.

Research suggests that children in the United States with savings accounts in their own names are substantially more likely to go to college than those who don’t. And the Institute on Assets and Social Policy analysis found that, depending on how much is invested in each account, the racial wealth gap could be narrowed by 20 to 80 percent or even more.

The models show the United States can begin to narrow its racial wealth gap with modest public investment, and get more impact the more we invest. Are there other ways to spend our money? Of course. But ensuring all children have opportunities to succeed would strengthen our economy and help realize our American ideals of fairness and equity.

Retirement accounts and children’s savings accounts would make the biggest impact in combination with other policies, such as raising the amount of savings and assets families are allowed to keep while still qualifying for public benefits and expanding access to programs that promote saving for homeownership.

Children from families without savings and assets are more likely to struggle at school and have low self-esteem. While Americans rush to keep pace with our global competitors in innovation and technology, we can’t afford to leave so many of our citizens permanently behind. Instead, let’s help them grow what they have worked so hard to earn.

The post How Opening a Savings Account Can Close the Racial Wealth Gap appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This month, we marked the 80th anniversary of the establishment of the most enduring policy success of the Great Depression, the program that reduced poverty for millions of older Americans.

But all that came two years after a retired doctor in Long Beach looked out his window one morning in 1933.

Since leaving the practice of medicine, Francis Townsend had become a not-very-successful, quite eccentric entrepreneur.

His next career was inspired when he looked out his window and watched three older women rummage through a trash can, searching for food beneath his window.

The sight enraged him. So he wrote a letter to the editor of the Long Beach Press-Telegram recounting the episode and his reaction to it.

“A torrent of invectives tore out of me, the big blast of bitterness that had been building in me for years,” he wrote. “I swore, I ranted, and I let my voice bellow with a wild hatred I had for things as they are.” He told the paper that at that moment, he had vowed to his wife that he would shout, “‘Until the whole country hears.’”

Townsend’s letter went on to condemn the ravages of the Depression and the cruelty of elder poverty. And then he made a fateful suggestion: The country should establish a new national retirement program that would both stimulate the economy and eliminate poverty for older Americans.

It was not surprising that such a suggestion would come from California, which had doubled its older population between 1920 and 1930. And it was appropriate that the idea emerged from Long Beach, where a third of the population was elderly.

In his book Endangered Dreams, California historian Kevin Starr described “the Long Beach elderly” of that time as “living on fixed incomes in simple cottages”:

[T]he majority of them folks from Iowa and elsewhere in the Midwest had come to Southern California to enjoy a simple life of church going, potluck suppers and checkers in the park …The Depression destroyed their plans as pension trusts shrank, or, in some cases, as they went under entirely … Fully 50 percent of the elderly in America were in need of some form of outside aid if they were to make it through the slump.

I know this history because I am a Southern California organizer and a policy wonk who has worked on issues impacting seniors in this country for over 30 years. This month, I am proud to be participating in events celebrating Social Security’s 80th birthday.

The program’s humble beginnings, with that letter, are a marvel. But the program is even more so. That rate of elder poverty has since dropped from 50 percent to nearly single digits. Life expectancy has gone way up. Americans can expect to age with dignity.

Over the decades, Social Security has grown beyond Dr. Townsend’s visions to cover disabled workers, as well as surviving spouses and children. And for all the criticism from skeptics about the program’s finances, reports show that Social Security is solvent and will be able to pay full benefits for a very long time. Today, it has a surplus of more than $2 trillion.

The history of Social Security itself suggests that bold changes in the program—perhaps even including its expansion in a time of government budget cuts—may be more viable than cynics assume.

What’s most remarkable about Townsend’s letter is the breathtaking speed of what happened next. The doctor received such an outpouring of support and shared outrage that he devised what he called the Townsend Plan.

Townsend laid out his plan in a series of additional letters to the newspaper. The substance was simple. He called for a $200 pension to everyone over the age of 60, funded by a 2 percent sales tax on all business transactions. Recipients, who had to be fully retired and without a significant criminal record, would be required to spend every cent of these monthly allotments. At the time, $200 a month was sufficient for a middle-class lifestyle. Thus the plan would be a major step in bringing people over 60 out of poverty while stimulating the national economy.

Less than four months after the letter to the editor’s publication, in January 1934, Townsend and a colleague incorporated an entity called Old Age Revolving Pensions, Limited. Eight months later, the first Townsend Club, an entity to support the plan, was organized in Huntington Park, California. By January 1935, a half million Americans had joined Townsend Clubs across the country, generating $1 million in dues and donations. That same year, Townsend made the cover of Time magazine. And a newly elected congressman from Los Angeles introduced legislation to implement the Townsend Plan.

There was more than one movement that pressured the Roosevelt Administration to create the program. And the president had been clear as far as back as 1932 that a program of social insurance for seniors was one of his goals. But history is clear that the Townsend movement was a key force in making it happen.

The passage of Social Security did not end Townsend’s movement for retirement security. Ultimately, over 2.1 million people joined more than 7,000 Townsend Clubs throughout the country. The vibrancy of the movement was so strong that in 1936 the clubs delivered petitions to Congress with 10 million signatures to back higher benefits for Social Security.

Townsend himself saw his plan as more than a retirement or stimulus. He wanted to organize and inspire the country to collective action. In an April 1935 letter to the Townsend Clubs, he outlined their primary goal–”enactment of the Townsend Plan into law”—then added, “The secondary purpose of Townsend clubs is a desperate fight to continue the democratic spirit and form of government in these United States.”

This mix—of urgency for passage in the now, and a long-term commitment to vibrant democracy—was the most profound feature of this movement led by a doctor from Long Beach. It is why Townsend succeeded. The Long Beach origins of Social Security are a reminder that grassroots organizing, for all its difficulties and challenges, is both possible and imperative if you want to change the world outside your window.

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And so, though I’m not rich or famous, as a retired California state worker I’m reasonably secure. I get a modest but safe state pension which, coupled with Social Security and a veteran’s disability check, gives me about 70 percent of what I made while working. That keeps food on the table and the wolves away from my door. I also get good health care coverage through a comprehensive Kaiser Medicare Advantage plan coupled with state paid supplemental benefits.

You may have heard that the retirement costs of workers like me are a fiscal problem for the state and the country. They are not. The real problem is the opposite: I’m becoming a rarity.

Fewer and fewer workers can expect or aspire to the modest retirement I have. The number of people receiving secure pensions has been in decline for at least 30 years; the number of pension plans of any sort today is just a quarter of what the number was in 1984.

Retirement security declined sharply in the Great Recession, in 2008 and just after, when Americans on the verge of retirement—ages 55 to 64—lost a third of their net worth. Younger boomers lost even more. Today, over 23 million Americans who are 60 and older are economically insecure, living at or below 250 percent of the federal poverty level. Five years ago, only one in five private sector workers enjoyed the sort of traditional defined benefit pension plan that supported our parents and grandparents for as long as they lived. Today, as companies eliminate such plans even more rapidly, the number is down to one in seven.

The outlook for the future is even bleaker. Back in 1991, half of all American workers planned to retire before they reached the age of 65. Today, that number is 23 percent.

In 2008, the US Government Accountability office reported that half of all companies that still have the old, secure defined benefit pension plans are freezing them and forcing newer employees into much less secure defined contribution plans. The GAO predicted that the remaining secure private sector pensions would be gone within a few years. And then there’s Social Security, which makes up about 38 percent of total income for the elderly, and for 1 in 3 retirees, it is their only income source.

Moreover, the Social Security fund will be exhausted within decades. After that time, contemporaneous money paid into the fund will be enough to pay only about 75 percent of benefits. As Social Security’s most recent annual report warns, the window for making changes to stabilize the fund is small and closing soon. All this spells a cold, hard old age for our children and grandchildren.

The reality of that cataclysm hit home to me not long ago when I was waited on at a fast food place by a sweet old lady maybe ten years older than I am. I imagine her pay was not much above minimum wage, say $8 an hour. (Maybe I’m wrong and she owned the franchise, but she looked frail and arthritic and hardly appeared to be the boss.) Those are poverty line wages and I would shudder to think that my fellow Boomer retirees are headed for a similar existence.

Public employees have not been spared from the attack on retirement security. The pensions of those of us who served the public are increasingly at risk. Recent polls show that here in my state of California, many people, alarmed by supposedly common $100,000 pensions, now believe that public pensions are too large and that those pensions threaten the solvency of state government.

In reality, 98 percent of public retirees barely get by on modest pensions. Half get less than $1,500 a month and many—teachers and public safety workers among them – do not even receive Social Security.

One would think that private sector workers, having seen their own pensions trashed, would stand at the barricades along with public workers to protect public pensions, if only to rebuild support for secure pensions as a whole. Instead, antipathy toward public workers seems on the rise.

Who’s hurt? Minorities, for one. African Americans are 30 percent more likely to be public employees than any other race. So, let public pensions shrink and African Americans will be disproportionately affected. The same will almost certainly be true for Latinos, whose retirement savings are about half those of non-Latino whites.

Finally comes the issue of OPEB, Other Post-Employment Benefits, principally health care. Here is where my own greatest concern lies. While my pension is secure for the foreseeable future, my health care coverage could be revoked at any time. It is at the mercy of our elected leaders and the voters. Like most public employers in the US, California does not set aside money in advance to cover health care for its retirees. It is pay as you go. The state budget has recovered from the awful effects of the Great Recession, but nothing says that we won’t face another similar fiscal mess. If so, non-guaranteed costs like retiree health benefits could be among the first things tossed overboard. National estimates of unfunded public retiree health costs run from $1.2 trillion to $2 trillion.

This January, in a unanimous decision, the US Supreme Court threw out previous dicta guaranteeing vested lifetime health benefits for retirees and sent the issue back to a lower court to determine how or even if such a lifetime guarantee should apply. Few private employers provide such coverage and the decision is likely to end even that. Public sector workers may fare little better. Here in California some state workers with sufficient service credit at retirement now receive full employer paid health coverage. Because of the Supreme Court’s action, such continued coverage is likely to be a significant bargaining issue in future contract negotiations.

A piece in the San Francisco Chronicle notes that the Affordable Care Act may be the savior of retiree health benefits. Governments could simply eliminate their retirees’ health benefits and instead give them a subsidy to buy health coverage under Obamacare, thus turning a program to ensure all Americans have health coverage into a bailout for strapped or fiscally irresponsible governments. Detroit, as part of its bankruptcy plan, will stop providing health care to retirees not yet eligible for Medicare, the Chronicle noted, and instead give them each a stipend to buy insurance in the Obamacare exchange. Other cash-poor governments will likely follow suit.

My own pension is probably not at risk. The California Public Employees Retirement fund is solvent and well-managed. I’m old enough for Medicare and the small additional amount the state pays for my Medicare supplement is affordable for it. But I fear greatly for those coming after me. I certainly do not want, in my senior years, to have to see oldsters from Gen X and beyond (my kids included) flipping burgers to supplement their meager retirement savings. Or worse, facing what Shakespeare described: mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. And, he might have added, sans health care and pension, too.

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