EAST MONTPELIER – It’s likely the unavoidable fate of both teenagers and golden-agers that most news reporters and writers are aspiring twenty-somethings eager to make splashes. Thus, if a young person with a newly minted driver’s license loses control of their vehicle on a slippery night, the headline will include their age. Likewise with the old grandmother who drives over a curb and whacks a storefront: 82-YEAR-OLD DRIVER LOSES CONTROL, CRASHES INTO STORE. The ages of drivers between those extremes will likely be included in the text of the news story. That’s ageism, and it’s pernicious.
I’m not beating the drum for the teenagers. I haven’t been one for 70 years; they’re on their own. But I do object to the ageism currently rampant in the media with regard to one of the two presumptive candidates for President of the United States. Is Biden too old? the pundits constantly ask. The same pundits refer to his rival’s age (which is a mere year or two less) almost in passing. We appear to be stuck with two geriatric candidates not so much because they’re old as because the youngsters driving the media won’t let up on it, at least with regard to the President.
I’m a bit grumpy on the subject most likely because either one of these candidates could be my kid brother, and to tell you the truth, when I’m out in my little silver roadster on a sunny day with the top down and either my dog or my girlfriend by my side, or the speakers caressing the air with the music of either Grandpa Jones or the Back Forty String Band (three entirely different situations), I’m feeling bright and energetic enough to straighten out the world. But too smart to apply for the job.
How soon we forget the long-time chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, active in politics from 1949 until 1967, when he was 91 years old. He saw West Germany through many difficult years of coexistence with Communist East Germany, even though young leaders like John F. Kennedy considered him a relic of the archaic past. His constituents, both admiring and otherwise, called him Der Alte (The Old Man). Somehow, in spite of his age, he managed.
I will admit to occasional holes in my memory that are most irritating and began popping up two or three years ago (I don’t remember exactly). One word that’s always eluded me is “actuary.” When I come up against it, I recall that I have a method for digging it out – the alphabet. I know it starts with “a.” So I start adding to it: aa (aardvark? No), ab (ablutions? No). ac (Aha! Got it!) As long as I never try to use it in a public speech, I can avoid a Mitch McConnell-type freeze while I ransack my mind for it. It turns out – and I’ve checked this with not only my contemporaries, but youngsters in their 70s, as well – and found it to be endemic.
President Biden has a stutter, which emerges now and then and, to the ignorant or unsympathetic, makes him seem to be fishing for a word. Mr. Trump has mocked him for it, enraging speech therapists. My father, who was an Episcopal priest, had a stammer. When he hit a word he couldn’t say, he spelled it instead. To think of making fun of him for it would have been beneath contemptible.
Especially if the jibes came from a renowned composer of word salads. For a hardly believable example, google “Donald Trump on wind energy.” Here’s a precis of one of his disquisitions on the subject: “I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything.” The thought that this particular old guy – old before his time, by the sound of it – might in less than a year be at the helm of my nation is chilling in the extreme.
There are lots of ways to poke fun at old age – like the two retired Vikings contemplating their prescription bottles and lamenting that “pillage” no longer means what it once did. Then there’s the heroic, as in Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” when the restless old voyager exhorts his former shipmates: “Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Give us geezers a chance. We didn’t get this old by being stupid. Distinguish between us by our words and deeds; but most of all, treat us as equals.
