Living

According to a report recently released by the Windham Aging group 14,015 people or 31% of the Windham County area is over the age of 60 and that number is projected to increase while the numbers for lower age groups is projected to decrease. The numbers are similar for the state as well as the rest of the country. The bottom line is that the average age of our population is growing and there will be a lot of older people in the years to come.

Our society currently doesn’t have the capacity to deal with the elderly population that we have. There are not enough home care providers and nursing homes and it is almost impossible for someone to stay at home as they age and become infirm unless they have an unlimited amount of financial resources.

We have never had a national discussion about how our government should support the aging population. Most other developed countries around the world provide more support for the elderly but the United States has left matters to be solved by chance. If you have enough money you may be able to age gracefully, but most of us do not have those kind of resources. It is rare for people to make concrete plans for life after 60.

A number of years ago there was controversy over the use of food that had been modified by genetic engineering. People believed we were heading into unknown territory and that if we manipulated the genes of the food we eat we might have to deal with dangerous unintended consequences. As a result, some states required the labelling of food that might be considered to be Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO’s).

I have been making a self-guided educational effort to understand the current revolution of genetic engineering for the past four years. There have been monumental scientific breakthroughs in genetic engineering and they revolve around something called CRISPR, an acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. The CRISPR technology allows scientists to alter the genetic makeup of cells. It is a complex process, but the bottom line is that CRISPR has the potential to change our ability to fight disease in plants, animals and humans among other processes.

Anyone who is even marginally engaged with today’s world cannot help but feel some degree of anxiety watching local and world events unfold. A lot of people have decided to either ration their contact with all forms of media or shut themselves off completely from the near-constant barrage of murder, mayhem and demeaning and hostile rhetoric.

The human species has the potential for creating a peaceful, humane and loving world but most of the activity we see does the opposite. That does not mean that there are not a lot of people who work hard to cultivate what is best in the human spirit, but their efforts are too often Sisyphean.

Please join us for an informal yet informative discussion on the changes to Act 39, Medical Aid in Dying. With passage of H. 190, removing the residency requirement from Act 39 on May 2, 2023, qualifying non-Vermont residents gained access to Medical Aid in Dying in Vermont. We will have the opportunity to discuss this change and the special challenges it may create, as well as talk about Act 39 in general.

What is a Kitchen Table Conversation? When you think about some of your most engaging and interesting conversations, didn’t many of them happen around a kitchen table? Staff and volunteers with knowledge and experience on this subject will be sitting around the table with you, and together we will talk in a supportive and congenial atmosphere.

People who have to deal with the burden of an incurable disease often hold out hope that there will be a cure before the disease takes their lives. Diseases such as ALS, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, Type 1 diabetes and many types of cancer as well as a host of other diseases may have treatments to alleviate symptoms but the disease still moves in often relentless and unpredictable ways.

Hoping for a cure borders on delusional thinking partly because of the time it takes to develop treatments and also because of the cost of any curative regimen. A recent news item about sickle cell anemia drives this point home all too clearly.

A few years ago Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier received the Nobel prize for their work with the gene editing technology called CRISPR. CRISPR is an acronym for clustered regularly interspersed palindromic repeats. It is a process that allows scientists to change the structure of genes.