Online: | |
Visits: | |
Stories: |
Until I turned sixty-six, retired, and officially joined the ranks of “the olds,” I lived for decades as an unreflecting and unapologetic ageist. Not as a mean-spirited person and proud of being open-minded and progressive. I have always tried to guard against bias in my thoughts and actions, and to fight bigotry wherever it cast its sulphurous gloom. But somehow, my prejudices about old people seemed to be natural, to reflect the facts of life, to share in the universal consensus. Being old was simply bad, wasn’t it? This felt like a solid fact, an incontrovertible position and, in the USA, also a basically uncontroversial one. In America—youth-worshipping, plastic-surgery-tweaked America—ageism stands as one of the last widely acceptable prejudices.
Everyone, it seems, indulges in it, even the most conscientious among us. It is reflected in our workplaces, courts, laws, and public policies. In movies, on television shows, on the nightly news, and in pharmaceutical commercial after pharmaceutical commercial, we chuckle and grin to see seniors portrayed as cute, helpless, and feeble, stumbling through what’s left of their lives in a fog of befuddlement. We have developed a whole vocabulary … click HERE to continue reading