The wealth gap between younger and older Americans is reported to be wider than ever. According to census bureau numbers young working families are worse off than older people. This would be expected if you consider that the longer you work the more your income goes up and the more you save for retirement. And when you’re starting out, you’re not making as much.

But funny thing about this is I don’t feel wealthy. And I sure don’t want young people thinking their elders are all sipping Glenlivet and perusing the cruise catalog.

I recognize the horrible squeeze on young people. I’m related to some. But older people have taken some of the same hits.

The numbers show the typical American household headed by a person 65 and older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35. That is, a median net worth of $3,662 for young families opposed to $170,494 for older ones.

The Pew Research Center analyzed the discrepancy this way. Young families are hurting because they’ve got mortgages on houses that aren’t worth as much as they paid for them and carry a load of student loans and credit card debt. The old are presumably doing better because we are thought to have paid off our houses and have investments. And on top of that we get Social Security.

And that’s when I thought uh-oh, this sounds like ammunition for generation warfare. And there it was.

Responding to the report, economist Harry Holzer from Georgetown University said, “It makes us wonder whether the extraordinary amount of resources we spend on retirees and their health care should be at least partially reallocated to those who are hurting worse than them.”

Oh Harry, I do agree. In part.  If you are eligible for Social Security and don’t need it or you can tell Medicare no thanks it would be a grand gesture to pass it on to a young family, maybe your own children and grandchildren.

But while I know some retirees who are living quite well, I doubt the majority of  oldsters are feeling fat on Social Security.  According to the Social Security Administration most retirees count on those monthly checks for a major  chunk of their income. And people over 65 represent the fastest growth in bankruptcy filings.

As for sharing the wealth that’s pretty much the message of the Occupy Wall Street movement. But the occupiers’ beef is not with greedy grannies. It’s with the one percent with all the dough. That’s why you see signs that say “Education is a Right” next to ones insisting “Save Medicare not Billionaires.”

I don’t know many older people who are leading a madcap life – okay, a few – but I do worry the image handily serves those wanting to gut retirement programs . We old ones are pretty mad at the system, too. Older people can remember when they were in their 30s and struggling and hoping that by the time they were in their 60s they would be feeling a lot more secure.

Older people are part of the dwindling middle class., too. We’ve seen our savings and investments shredded. We too have been hit by the housing bubble.  If we have any extra we may be paying for our adult kids’ health insurance or paying on those students loans and even caring for elderly parents.

I know plenty in their 60s and early 70s who say,  “I’m going to be working until I die.”

In fact the wage gap study noted that older Americans are holding onto to their jobs longer than ever while young people are facing the highest unemployment since World War II.

So, if we’re so wealthy why are we still working?

I like what Michael Levitin said early on about Occupy Wall Street’s reason for being.  “We are showing up and speaking to each other. It’s first about participation.”

He’s right. People are not staying home and feeling lousy, waiting for the next bad thing to happen. They’re showing up and talking and it feels pretty good.

I know Michael.  His mother is a friend.  He went to high school nearby. He’s a free lance journalist, a well-educated young man, accustomed to unsteady employment in an endangered profession. He was enroute to Europe when he stopped over in New York and went to Zuccotti Park to check out the gathering. He ended up becoming an editor for the Occupy Wall Street Journal. We’re all proud of him and delighted that he snagged such a great journalism job. And in print, of all things.

Now in its second month, the occupation is being pressured to declare itself. What do you want? How would you fix it? It’s sort of a put-up or shut-up challenge.

Ah, let’s see now. What wisdom have we heard from on high lately? All the king’s horses and all the king’s men – including a bunch of those one percent people – haven’t been able to put this country back together again. In fact, they’ve pretty much let Americans down. But they want to know what big idea the protesters have.

It’s pretty clear what the big shots want -  more money and more power. And how they would fix things? They wouldn’t.

What do the occupiers want? So far most still want a place to get together, a park near Wall Street or in front of city hall. That worries some people. How long will they be there? What will they do next? But others find it thrilling to finally have a common listening post.

I was away for the first country-wide occupation in mid-October. My husband and daughter sent videos of the one they attended in Santa Rosa, the sixth largest Occupy event in the nation that weekend.  I flashed them a virtual peace sign.

But recently I stood with a small group at the town square in my town of  Sebastopol on a rainy Saturday. They were trading ideas on forming Occupy Sebastopol. There were students, hikers, teachers, retirees, some city council members, business owners, poets and long haired hippies. They looked just like our town.

It was decided to establish a presence at the square but not interfere with the farmers market which dominates that space very Sunday. Overnight, like mushrooms, half a dozen tents sprung up in a corner of the square and that morning the market went on as usual. All in one place – your late tomatoes, your squash, your protest signs.

I complimented the market’s director on achieving peaceful co-existence and she said, “This way I get to occupy and work at the same time.” An apple seller was excited about young people asking for a better shot at the future. “We had our turn,” she said. “Now it’s theirs.”

The occupy movement is making a lot of people more hopeful than they’ve been in a long time. For all our lives we’ve heard that Americans are better off than everybody else in the world. But a recent survey showed what we knew in our stomachs. Things have been way off.

New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow wrote about a German study by the Bertelsmann Shiftung Foundation in a piece titled America’s Exploding Pipe Dream. The survey showed that compared to other countries the U.S. has a social justice rating that is practically rock bottom. We have greater income inequality than most countries. Our overall poverty prevention rating is lousy. We have dismal child poverty rates and are not so good about taking care of senior citizens.

Can Occupy fix any of that? I don’t know, but like my friend Al said, “In the immortal words of Stephen Stills, “Something’s happening here.”

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Lately I’ve been turning to news about women in other countries instead of my own to feel better about gender progress. Women in Saudi Arabia get the vote.  Libyan women help lead their revolution.

So, what have we done for ourselves lately?

I know it’s relative. American women have many freedoms. And Saudi women still can’t drive. But of the best places in the world to be a woman, the United States currently ranks number eight, said a Newsweek report.

It helped to meet up with Jackie Speier, the Bay Area Democratic Congresswoman who earlier this year delivered what some dubbed “the speech heard round the world.” Jackie, you’ll remember, told a colleague he didn’t know squat abut women and abortion. Then she stood on the floor of the House and told her own story about having to abort at 17 weeks due to a medical complication.

It was a purely spontaneous reaction she recalled at a recent talk I attended.  In the debate over funding Planned Parenthood New Jersey Republican Chris Smith read graphic descriptions about abortion. When he started in about a leg being pulled out and sawed off Jackie said she had to scrap her intended speech and take him on.

After it was over she said she was “kind of trembling” but the response was overwhelmingly positive. John Lewis, the congressman from Georgia, told her it was the most incredible speech he’d heard on the floor.

“He said it took him back to when he was a young boy and his aunt one day appeared with blood all over her dress. His mother took his aunt to the hospital and she never came home again.”

With Jackie’s help Planned Parenthood held onto its funding. It also gained a huge increase in members.

Most people first heard about Jackie Speier in 1978 when she was shot but survived the massacre at Jonestown which killed her boss Congressman Leo Ryan. She’s no lightweight. She walks into a room with her big smile and pile of auburn hair and starts talking about how we’re really in trouble, especially women, and she has some ideas.

In her talk at a women’s networking organization in Sonoma County, not all women, not all Democrats, Jackie brought up two more issues that get her going.  Rape in the military and sexual trafficking.

She’s been collecting accounts of soldiers raping soldiers and has started telling them one story at a time on the floor of the House. There’s an Army sergeant who went to her military chaplain and was told the rape might have been God’s will and she needed to go to church more.

Jackie said: “I cannot stand that a soldier could be the object of violence from another solider, more than from the enemy.”

She’s also working to toughen laws against sex trafficking in this country, which she said has increased with the internet and since drug cartels began taking over. She told about a 16 year old girl who was forced to have sex from 10 to 14 times a day.

At a time when the communication skills of many government leaders seem to range from equivocation to hiding under their seats, it’s so refreshing to meet a Jackie Speier who is unafraid to speak the truth to power.

Jackie said, “I may not be senior enough to get things through committee but I can use the floor of the House.”

Not surprising one of her guiding quotes is, “Well behaved women seldom make history.”