On Occasion of a Facebook Friend's 40th Birthday

Preface: For those who don't reach this post via the link in this friend's comments, I'm omitting the name unless my friend asks for attribution. The call for comments upon this person's 40th birthday inspired the following. It turned out to be so pertinent in an everyday situation that I couldn't help but repost here.

You just turned 40? Congratulations! You now know *exactly* what it feels like to be 50; only with a decade less ageism to contend with; which will definitely become your increasingly intimate life partner, from here.

I love all the upbeat comments here and agree with every single one of them. At the same time, it's moments like this that can also help us to see the real life impacts of yet unrealized democratic ideals on real people in our everyday lives. This may not have impacted you yet, but from 40, it's a very real aspect of all our work lives, today.

It doesn't matter that the EEOC says ageism is just as illegal as racism or genderism so long as HR continues is institutionalized "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward rampant age based discrimination.

The web is teaming with ways to "don't bring it up, just dress hipper, act younger, be something you're not," anything that absolves employers of responsibility to obey the law.

"One explanation for ageism’s perseverance may be that historically society has perceived age discrimination as more of an economics issue than a question of fundamental civil rights. Ageism has been viewed as different from and less serious than racism or sexism in the work place. This perception has relegated the ADEA to second class status amongst the country’s civil rights statutes" ( EEOC, http://goo.gl/HTC5 ).

So see, it's not really discrimination like racism or sexism because everyone can agree that #OldPeopleSuck.

old.people.suck

Old Age, From Youth’s Narrow Prism

Excerpt from the New York Times:

All of us lapse into such mistaken impressions of old age from time to time. It stems in part from an age-centered perspective, in which we view our own age as the most normal of times, the way all life should be. At 18 the 50-year-olds may seem ancient, but at 50 we are apt to say the same about the 80-year-olds.

“So what’s it really like to be old?” I often ask my patients, who are mostly in their late 80s and 90s, and the responses are unexpected.

“I forgot I was so old,” a 100-year-old patient recently told me, and then excused herself to make it to bingo on time.

This age-centrism is particularly pervasive in people’s attitudes toward nursing homes. All too often we imagine that life seems to end at the nursing home door — that it is loveless and lonely, with death hovering close by.

We make this mistake when we refuse to see the needs for intimacy even in the most debilitated elderly. Our youth-centered culture equates love with sex; in contrast, I have seen with my older patients that love can be an endlessly blossoming flower, felt and expressed in hundreds of ways. A friend’s mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease has fallen in love with another resident on her floor, and they walk around holding hands and snuggling with a newfound innocence that perhaps only their memory loss restored.

We also project our terror of death onto the aged, assuming that fear and depression must stalk the final years of life. And yet in my 15 years of working in nursing homes, I have never heard a patient say that he or she was afraid of death. Sometimes there is acceptance, other times anticipation, but most often it is not a great concern. Life goes on in its shadows.

old.people.suck