In their golden years, this isn’t the country they expected to be living in. So what now?
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Montebello resident Rosa Maria Juarez, 96, doesn’t like what’s happening to the country, and in these tumultuous times, she has a strategy for getting through each day.
“I’ve always kept up with the news, but I don’t want to watch it now,” Juarez said. “I don’t want to feel depressed … instead of happy, the way I am when I wake up.”
Avoiding daily news of President Trump’s attacks on the judiciary, the Constitution, the media, political enemies and foreign countries is but one part of Juarez’s game plan for survival. She also stays on the move, driving to the Pico Rivera Senior Center several times weekly for early-morning exercise classes and outdoor walks of up to two miles.
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
But she’s not Superwoman, so it’s impossible to shield herself completely from the daily barrage of bulletins from the nation’s capital, where Trump said this week that he’d like to detain and deport U.S. citizens and have them locked up in foreign prisons.
“We’re a country that’s going down, like the Titanic,” Juarez said. “I hope not, but what can we do?”
For the most part, I heard that same sense of despair, along with rage and dread, when I reached out to more than a dozen people of a certain age and asked if this is a drama they expected to be witnessing in their golden years.
Not at all, said Bernard Parks Sr., the former LAPD chief and fiscally conservative city councilman. “I never thought in my lifetime I’d see a person with 34 felonies be elected president,” said Parks. “The world is upside down.”
On the other hand, in the eyes of some Trump supporters, the world was upside down until he flipped it around.
“I am extremely happy that the country is now headed in the right direction, even with the chaos and some hiccups,” said Norman Eagle, a Palos Verdes Estates resident who recently dropped me a note to argue that I overstated the risk of potential threats to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in a recent column.
Eagle said he thinks Trump’s tariffs — which have roiled world markets, sparked fears of a recession and triggered panic among even some of his own supporters — will work out to the country’s benefit eventually. And he hopes the president’s efforts to get rid of waste, fraud and corruption will serve as a model for future administrations.
“Another important hope I have is that the insane woke ideology and extreme progressive thinking will completely disappear from the American scene and return home to Mars, where it likely originated,” Eagle added.
La Ca?ada resident Trent Sanders, who frequently dings California’s liberal politicos in emails to me and my colleagues, thinks Trump is generally on the right track three months into his term, but with a few caveats.
“I think most of what he’s doing is the right thing, but far too fast, and far too much,” Sanders said. And with “not enough thought before action.”
Among Trump’s detractors, there is no tolerance, and no end to the list of grievances, which include everything from dwindling retirement funds to Trump’s embrace of Russia and his head-slapping claim that Ukraine started the war that has killed thousands.
“I am embarrassed for my country on so many levels,” said Estela Lopez, director of a downtown L.A. business improvement district. She lamented, among other things, the “gobsmacking” cruelty of wholesale job cuts in the federal government and the “gutting of important medical research, vital public health information, and dismantling of protections that safeguard our food, air and water.”
“The runway ahead of me may be shorter than the one behind me,” Lopez said, “but I’d rather face it with every bit of intelligence and information available thanks to the scientific advances we have invested in and now seem to believe aren’t needed.”
“I never thought I’d be living through a constitutional crisis, but that’s what this is,” said Jane Demian of Eagle Rock. She said democratic principles we took for granted — “three co-equal branches of government,” for instance — are “now being challenged by the MAGA mobsters, and the Republicans are hiding.”
Jeffrey Mulqueen of Seal Beach has a name for all of this:
“The world has experienced fascism in the past and we are headed down that road in the USA,” said the retired school superintendent. “Consider the patterns of the Trump regime as they lace society with fear, fuel the fear with false information,” and threaten to expand the kingdom by conquering Canada and Greenland.
Ernest Salomon of Santa Barbara, almost 90, said he and some of his immediate family escaped German death camps while other relatives perished.
“I see a lot of similarities between the Trump regime and what took place before Hitler took power. Fear, turmoil, racism, lies, retribution and more,” said Salomon.
“Democracy,” he added, “is in peril.”
“I am wary and scared. Especially for our grandchildren,” said Jairo Angulo of West L.A., who harbors particular disdain for the coterie of Trump yes-men who won’t admit “the emperor has no clothes,” and for the millions of Democrats who sat out the last election.
“Selfishness, apathy and greed has propelled us to this point in time,” said Nick Patsaouras of Tarzana. “We are witnessing what Plato said over 2,000 years ago: ‘The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.’”
Alice Lynn, of Pacific Palisades, said that while struggling with the limitations and loss that come with aging, she is now a witness to the trampling of ideals at the core of her existence.
“I have never felt so hopeless and fearful,” said Lynn. “It is simply more than I can grasp. … All the issues I have fought for over the years, marched for, organized for — to bring about the good changes in our society — are now being unraveled.”
Meg Fairless, of Simi Valley, fears for generations to come. “Our first grandchild was born in March,” Fairless said, “so I hope we, as a nation, can pull together, relearn the power of courtesy, respect, compromise, acceptance [and] be a country that will be safe and happy for him to grow up in.”
Rosa Maria Juarez told me that as she approaches 100, she doesn’t know if she’ll see changes for the better in her lifetime, but she hopes her children and grandchildren will.
“I can do my part, even if it’s just a smidgeon,” she said, telling me that if she sees anyone who appears isolated or marginalized, at her senior center or elsewhere, she makes a point of connecting with them.
Denny Freidenrich of Laguna Beach has two grandchildren and a third on the way.
“That is why 20 of my friends and I are in the process of forming the Grandpa Brigade,” said Freidenrich, who is particularly worried about attacks on judges, lawyers and courts. “By standing up for the rule of law now, our collective hope is we will be leaving our grandkids the greatest gift of all: freedom.”
Kudos to Freidenrich and to Juarez for their good deeds. Meanwhile, in demonstrations across the country, crowds are growing. Tens of thousands attended a Los Angeles protest last weekend headlined by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y), who then took their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour to Coachella.
Kudos to them, too, for re-energizing voters while so many forlorn Democratic leaders twiddle their thumbs and nurse the hangover of defeat. But can the left wing of the fractured party build enough support to make a difference in two years, or in four?
A friend of mine who attended the L.A. rally said that while it was a rousing attack on current leadership, he didn’t hear a coherent, winning plan to bring down the ruling party.
So that’s my next question, and I ask it not just of people in my age group, but of those coming up behind us:
What’s the best way forward?
steve.lopez@latimes.com
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