April 15, 2004
Aging
The whole idea of “affirmative aging” is silly, patronizing, and trivial. This, of course, is only my take on it. It doesn’t clean it up much to call it “point of view” or “opinion,” just maybe sounds better than “bias.”
For one thing, when does aging start being affirmative? If getting born at all has any special value (and some would probably take exception to it if they had the chance), then it’s affirmative from the start. Suddenly to start calling aging affirmative at some arbitrary stage in life is absurd, sounds like an AARP lobby, and is probably insulting to God.
Our diocese has (or has had) an affirmative aging “program.” I’m never sure exactly why. The fact that its “director” seems always to be part time with a gradually diminishing budget ought to tell us something. There’s even a chaplain — volunteer, I think, for lack of anything else to do — who sends out hearts-and-flowers cards with pious, soap-operish messages on birthdays and anniversaries. The bishop tips his mitre once a year and invites all us old duffers, our spouses, and “survivors” to lunch. Otherwise, to us he’s more often out-to-lunch. He’d probably spend his time better embedded in Iraq.
I always find “survivors” a funereal thought, anyway, with an obituary creepiness about it or maybe at best a hokey TV show ambience. I’m never sure what it means. Survivors of what? Vestry meetings? Reinventing some ecclesiastical wheel every decade or so? Holy Week? Life?
There’s a lot of untapped experience and maybe even wisdom out there among what the Brits lovingly call the “old age pensioners.” Surely there’s a better, less sappy, way to find out about it, maybe even use it to get those “new” wheels on straight.
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