Looking Askance at Ageism

By Frank Trippett

Non-old Americans do not typically believe in euthanasia for everybody over 65 or 70, but a great many would agree with Pudd'nhead Wilson that "it is better to be a young Junebug than an old bird of paradise." The American worship of youthfulness, which has made big industries of facelift surgery and the hair dye trade, may seem vain but essentially harmless. Yet it has a seamier side. One outgrowth of the nation's aversion to aging has been a tendency to look askance at, and often down on, people in the later years of life. The attitude has lately been tagged with the awkward label ageism.

If only because of widespread ageism, Ronald Reagan's victories in the South and elsewhere should spark a brief moment of nonpartisan cheer among the nation's senior citizens. After all, the 69-year-old candidate did triumph at least briefly over the suspicion that anybody past middle age is a candidate for nothing but the pasture. To be sure, the issue of Reagan's age is not typical. It does make sense for voters to take a cold, actuarial look at anybody seeking the White House. But the more prevalent American way of judging the elderly is something else again.

That way is, in short, inconsistent and often unfair, and anybody clearly beyond the middle years is likely to run into it whether looking for a job, going to doctors (some of whom speak of the elderly as "old crocks") or just trying to enjoy existence. Americans, true, routinely honor older people for their supposed wisdom, but mainly in folklore. In reality, even though nobody can say for sure when old age begins, society is vaguely terrified of it and mystified by it. The result is that many older people wind up feeling that society would prefer them out of sight. And the increasing segregation of senior citizens in homogeneous retirement towns and nursing homes hints that this may often be true. Another hint can be found in the fact that depression is the commonest medical complaint of the obviously old.

It has long been plain that society has at least wanted older people out of productive life. Such was the meaning of the Social Security and retirement policies that began to roll forth in 1933. The message: 65 and out. While mandatory retirement has recently been relaxed, with the age advanced to 70, popular thinking still falsely tends to take age as a sure index of vitality. The stereotype of an old person as a doddering, drooling, irrelevant nuisance is much circulated. Beyond some uncertain year, people are often regarded as having little or no need for earthly pleasures, particularly sexual ones. Says Myrna Lewis, co-author of Sex After Sixty: "Children carry a double standard that older people should be monogamous or celibate just because they're old."

It may be that ageism, thanks to a backlash that has come from such groups as the Gray Panthers, is becoming less virulent. One ought to add that attitudes had better change. American society contains an ever swelling number and proportion of older people. Today nearly 25 million Americans, or 11.2% of the total, are over 65, and the ratio of that bracket is rising sharply. To foreclose senior citizens from society's respect and affection will mean more in the future than pain to the graying population. It will mean serious generational conflict for everybody.

Ageism existed, of course, long before the word for it. It works like other isms. Racism takes skin color as a determining sign of personality and character traits. Just so, ageism consists of taking a mere count of years as a sure gauge of somebody's capacity and vitality. But the troublesome truth is that the higher the age the less it dependably reveals about the hu man being. "The aged are a more diverse, heterogeneous group than any other," says Dr. Robert N. Butler, director of the Na tional Institute on Aging. "One may be at different 'ages' at one and the same time in terms of mental capacity, physical health, endurance, creativity and emotions." Widespread failure to grasp such realities breeds ageism of the most noxious variety.

To decide by age alone that a person can no longer be of vital use to the world is ridiculous. Innumerable examples, highly visible, prove that the number of one's years is an unreliable index of drive, lucidity and creativity. Indeed, a good part of the world -- Russia, China--is ruled by gerontocracies. And Pope John Paul II, at 59, is an exception to the more usual Roman Catholic practice of elevating the very old to run the world's largest church. England has remained conspicuous for its many vivacious nonagenarians long after the archetypal George Bernard Shaw passed from the scene at 94.

Industriously alive people in their 70s or 80s or '90s abound everywhere.

Consider Actresses Lillian Gish, 83, Ruth Gordon, 83, Mae West, 87, Movie Director King Vidor, 85, Sculptor Henry Moore, 81, Artist Marc Chagall, 92. All still at their thing, in one way or another. Composer-Pianist Eubie Blake, 97, still knocks out ragtime. The talk of Santa Fe, N. Mex., persists that nearby Artist Georgia O'Keefe, 92, might marry her boyfriend, Juan Hamilton, 34.

Consider Composer Virgil Thomson, 83, Painter Joan Miro, 86, Psychiatrist Karl Menninger, 86, Litterateur Malcolm Cowley, 81, Novelist Rebecca West, 87. Vital one and all. Guitarist Andres Segovia, 87, practices several hours a day. Environmental Guru Buckminster Fuller, 84, is on the road, lecturing and preaching, as much as an oldtime vaudeville star. Nimble Fred Astaire, 80, may have given up dancing but not romancing: he says he may marry Girlfriend Robyn Smith, 35, the jockey.

Lawyer John Jay McCloy, 84, is still advising national leaders and reports for daily duty at his New York City law office. Artist Louise Nevelson, 79, put together a fresh exhibit of her work only last year. Atlanta Board of Education President Benjamin Mays, 84, is at work on a book he plans to finish by age 87. Cincinnati Financier Irvin Westheimer, who founded the organization called Big Brothers in 1903, was still talking new ideas when he celebrated his 100th birthday in 1979.

Case closed. If all possible examples were catalogued they would no longer seem exceptional. Finally, it is condescending to express amazement when older people go on living life. The oldtimers themselves are mostly amazed that their vitality seems to surprise their juniors. It is fair to assume, in the end, that the reactions of the young to the presence of the aged include a good deal of buried awe and even fear. Aging remains, after all, mysterious, its processes far from clearly understood by science. Research has pinned down some things about aging, however. One thing that the helpless senility that is part of the common stereotype of the aged is not common at all in real life. In fact, not more than 8% of old people suffer from it.

It is ignorance of that truth, among others, that sets the stage for ageism, that patchwork of prejudices and predispositions. This ism, like others, is likely to be ameliorated only by the outcry of reality. It will not be banished by edict. It will remain for individuals to prove, by the sheer living of life, that habitual beliefs about the meaning of age are often at variance with the truths of the heart.

--Frank Trippett

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