Someone this morning forwarded to me on WhatsApp the below video-clip accompanied by this cloyingly mushy message:
This elderly lady of 90 years old in China is a model. She models for elderly people’s clothes. Amazing at 90 years old, look at her strides and poise💐👏🏼Walking along with her is her grandson. Amazing. Age is just a number….dedicated to those who think they are getting old😝
I watched the video and it made me think this :
Why is the whole world prejudiced against Age ?Doesn’t this kind of subtle, subliminal messaging betray really a subconscious, irrational phobia of “getting old”?
This phobia has a name: it’s called gerontophobia.
Gerontophobia — fear and loathing of the old and of growing old — is rampant in the world today . It gets sugar-coated by sweet, cloying cliches such as “Oh, but Age is just a number”… etc.
As Jonathan Swift, Irish satirist and author of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) observed, “Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.”
Publicly we proclaim that discrimination based on race, religion, sex, social standing or disability is wrong. But ageism is not all that wrong. It is still accepted practice against the weakest among us.
We value old things but not old people. A vintage wine is treasured. Fine scotch whiskies are enjoyed for their age and complexities. Some antique furniture is worth a lot of money. Philately or Numismatics is all about collecting old stamps and old coins. But who wants to collect old people ?
Prejudice against the old is everywhere. Even Pope Francis, 84, had once in a speech in 2014 to the European Parliament in Strasbourg criticized Europe as “a ‘grandmother’ no longer fertile and vibrant.” By so blatantly declaring his age-, if not gender-, bias he joined the multitude of oldie-bashing secret-societies of the world.
We all of course do give pious and politically correct lip-service to venerating our elders but in fact we secretly wish the old could somehow be magically made invisible. We quarantine them out of sight and hopefully out of mind too. They remind us of our own mortality, of what is awaiting us also. And we just don’t like it. We never have.
Even in the so-called “advanced” countries of the West or those calling themselves as “OECD countries”, the plight of elderly populations is, graphically speaking, quite penurious as this chart below tells us:
Ageism, like racism or sexism, is as old as the ages. “Senectus morbidus est,” wrote Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca (ironically, “Seneca the Younger”!) in the 1st century AD: “Old age is a disease.”
Seneca forgot to add that it is an incurable disease.
Sudarshan Madabushi
Excellent!
Chittanandam