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The ugly and dehumanising we talk about 'old' people makes me RAGE and it should make you rage too. Let's stop with the ageist remarks. A THREAD.
Last week I took my parents for their second round of Covid-19 vaccination. While waiting for our turn, it struck me how many adult children had brought their elderly and frail parents to the middle of nowhere on a dark, winter afternoon, to protect them from the pandemic.
There was so much love on display, a sense of team effort from all the children. It was clear how much all of us waiting value our elderly parents. They might need some looking after but our older generation bring so much value to our communities in ways which we must preserve.
At a family level the last year has shown how much care and love we take for those deemed as elderly. Yet the backdrop to these individual human stories is a much darker and dangerous picture when it comes to the way we talk about and act towards older people at a societal level.
Joe Biden's candidacy was surrounded by talk of whether he was too old to be president. Former US President Donald Trump often used the tactic of age to belittle him, calling the President ‘sleepy Joe’. (Trump himself was old, but found age so ugly he didn't associate with it.)
Satirists have a habit of picking on one characteristic of a leader. But to use the crutch of age, seems unforgivable. Every age has its challenges and strengths. And every leader has their personal, physical and health challenges. It's disrespectful to every older person.
The pandemic has brought out ugly attitudes to the elderly. In discussions about deaths people dismissively point to median ages in the 80s. Early in the pandemic, deaths of the elderly in care homes were not included. All of which as if to mean they were old, they died, so what?
Our elderly are not a meaningless dispensable burden. They are repositories of institutional memory, the foundations of our identities. They bind younger generations to society and give them a sense of place and purpose.
The elderly are our mums and dads, our uncles and aunts, our grandparents, our neighbours and our colleagues. And their value is not just in relation to us, but very much inherent in their own identities. Often, the elderly are in the best phase of their life.
After a lifetime of work, the elderly may finally have the time and resources for all they've waited to do for decades. Mortgage paid, children grown, it's not about retirement or giving up,.They are not elderly waiting to die, they are alive, living life on their own terms.
The paradox is we deem the elderly as irrelevant and instead glorify youth. But globally and in the UK more of us than ever are growing 'old'. So diminishing the elderly isn’t just discriminatory and small-minded, it's bad for ourselves because we will be there one day too.
There are too many caricatures of old age, perpetuated without even realising. A 2020 report by the Centre for @Ageing_Better showed how older people are widely mocked and patronised, seen as incompetent, hostile or a burden on others https://www.ageing-better.org.uk/publications/doddery-dear-examining-age-related-stereotypes
Underpinning distasteful ageist stereotypes is the idea that old age is a singular homogenous state. But like any other demographic, age is full of individual and varied life experiences. What was considered 'old' in the past- 50s, 40s even 30s - is now the prime of life.
Our attitude to age reflects in the language we use when we talk about older people. For example The Stop Ageism campaign prioritises changing how we talk about age as a first step https://www.stopageism.org/
“Why is it still acceptable to use outright discriminatory terms for older people in society? We need to define people by who they really are and the value they bring.” We talk dismissively of our ‘elderly’ as though they have no value in themselves or to society.
In the pandemic we've seen how at an individual level our hearts burst with love for those further along life’s journey than us. We need to do that at a societal level, rather than feed ugly ageist attitudes. Until then we should all be raging against age discrimination together.
