With Remembrance Day just passing, there has been an influx of articles paying tribute in memory to all that the wars have laid bare. We give it a moment in our busy schedules to remember the events that remain catastrophic and nailed to our collective upbringing. So, I thought it might be a good time to write something small on the predominant population we usually imagine when we give pause for Remembrance Day: the elderly. Setting aside the fact that war happens and is happening everyday in many parts of the globe, here - in present day Limerick or similar elsewheres - we often demarcate our commemoration from the "Great War" (the First World War or shall we say the War of 1914-1918) onward. And television is anything but predictable in the choreography of the symbolic festivities with the close-ups of the war veterans with the backdrop of flags, symbols, and decorated uniforms. Handshakes are given a plenty, semiotics of military solemnity, and often genuine grief and memory are shared. But I digress... This isn't a Nietzschesque critique on the 'spectacle.' I use the albeit loose association of past wars to the elderly to make a point on the lives of the other days these men and women live besides our remembrance. I have wondered on the incoming health 'burden' of the aging population, but if a youth willed it, a youth could probably go about their day without really conversing with an 'elderly' for the entire day. Consider this. To "youth" - the abstract generalized youth - there is a uncanny invisibility of the elderly one can have if the youth isolates the local social worlds they may inhabit. It is, in our ever linear definition of how we experience our lives in time, a divisive binary entity to the 'old'. And, until this figurative 'youth' steps past that vague line of the hazy 'middle', old remains distant until one is young underneath the flesh of the old. Age is invisible until a point of reference is considered against it and in that definition, it's an 'empty' theoretical concept (Yes, yes - biomedically, we can consider an alternative definition, but that's not my point). The argument is, the 'old' is invisible. Easy point being, you might not think twice about a chair even when you're sitting on so many of them everyday. Psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, writers, and historians have all taken turns to explain this 'age' we speak of. Psychologists and psychiatrists often use the 'developmental theory.' Erik Erikson's a classic one people use if you want a place to start. Anthropologists (especially the undergraduates) love to throw around liminality by Victor Turner and historians argue temporal dimensions on how to shape their stories. Geneticists and our biomedical gaze have described the (epi)genetics of our aging and senescence including some theories of telomeres and so on. Writers - well, I won't generalize those textual thieves of imagination. But I digress academically a second time. If age is such a curious empty socio-cultural thing, where are the voices of the elderly? Where is our societal democratic emphasis on this allegedly massive population? In stark contrast to the solemn majesty of remembrance, there's been a Channel 4 clip going around the feeds showing the loneliness of the 'elderly'. Of course, not all elderly are like this, but the issue has been that many are. The elderly are corralled into the margins. These elderly, in the linear age defining world we have constructed are often found in the corners, in the institutions and homes on the periphery as far as optics of the media, the conversations of the colloquial, and the policies of the state are concerned. If they arise, they are usually a reflection of their non-utility, patronizing humour, or to the health professionals, the 'health burden' they will inflict (i.e. "go into geriatrics, you'll have a job!"). And here lies a curiosity with the elderly unlike many other marginalized group issues. The elderly is, in some sense, our parents, our grandparents, our society, and us. That's us in the chair. Alone. We can advocate aggressively about poverty, but to the rich, it's still an othering and reflection of an implicit difference in affluence and power (sidenote: yes, charity is a reflection of the implicit power you actually have). But, we get old. We age. We, of youth, remain forever young in our old age. Until death. Now, that's a different divide.... Thus, concepts matter. Ideas of aging matter. It matters because, if we pay attention to even our linear notions of time and identity, we are the elderly. Thus, how we treat and seek approaches to meeting the collective needs of the elderly is pivotal, even to our own self-interests. Or at least, that's an argument I use to those realpolitik selfish types.... Anywho, there are many who make far better eloquent statements on the issues of aging and the elderly than I. Instead, I give you Charlie Brooker's wonderfully biting and dark humour on TV (shall we say media, societal norms?). He's good fun to pass the time on our little wandering. Have a peek below! Sang Ik is a second year student at UL GEMs.
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CaesuraRotating views on various subjects concerning health (in)equity Health Equity NutSome streams of consciousness on the subjects of the tragic and the mundane. Archives
February 2021
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