What is The Radical Age Movement?

People are living longer, and yet we as a society don’t know how to make the best use of these extra years.  And, because of our fears and negative stereotypes about ageing, we’re not just ignoring the potential value–we’re often making things worse.

We need new social visions that will inspire and support people to grow and participate actively throughout their entire lives.  No age-segregation or pitting generation against generation–we want a society that works for us all.  We can’t leave it to ‘experts’ to tell us how to age ‘well’ or ‘successfully’ or to an ageing industrial complex that sees older adults as a dependent group or growing market of consumers.

It’s up to us.  It’s time for a Radical Age Movement, a grassroots nationwide effort that challenges traditional notions of ageing and introduces new ideas for building co-creative and interdependent communities.

Working together, we can:

• Challenge ageism – in ourselves, social practices, policies, and institutions;
• Create new language and models that embrace the full life journey;
• Create new paradigms in society so that adults can participate fully consistent with their capabilities and ambitions at all stages of life;
• Celebrate the contributions of older adults toward innovating, changing and repairing the world;
• Create a more compassionate and interdependent society that supports the well-being of people of all ages;
• Inspire and help develop cross-generational communities where people of all ages enjoy the gifts and capacities they have to offer;
• Bring dying and death out of the closet.

Through conversation, consciousness raising, mainstream and social media, presentations, and social action, The Radical Age Movement seeks to build a movement dedicated to confronting ageism in all its forms whether it be discrimination in the work place or marginalization of older or younger people in decision making and purposeful participation in all aspects of civic and community life.

Consciousness Raising: Its Time Has Come Again

by Alice Fisher. M.S.W.

Like many women my age, I participated in the feminist consciousness raising movement of the sixties. It was a powerful vehicle for exploring our innermost feelings about being women, mothers, daughters, wives, and our role in society. For many of us it was the first time we confronted the issue of misogyny (or even knew what it meant) and, not the least, got to touch our own misogynist inclinations having grown up in a male dominant society.

Here I am over 40 years later doing the same thing. Only this time, the topic that my consciousness raising group is exploring is ageism and what it means to grow old. A main difference between our aging consciousness raising group and the feminist groups of the past is that the group is made up of both men and women. Aging makes no gender distinction, and we all grew up in this virulent youth culture that says young equals good and old equals…well, let’s say, not so good. We are a 10-person group, aged 60 to 85. We meet every week for 1-1/2 hours. In order to make it easier for the group, we meet in person every other week. On the weeks in between, we connect virtually through our computers. To our surprise, this has proved to work remarkably well. Our hope is that as we confront our own ageist attitudes we will be able to change the way we perceive aging ourselves and hopefully change society’s ageist attitude towards the old and elderly.

Ageism is an interesting prejudice. Aging is the common denominator for everyone who is born. If fortunate, we are all going to get old. We are all going to die. So being judgmental about people just because of their age, or their wrinkles, or their slower pace, is sowing the seeds for our own internalized ageism.

As we progress in our own consciousness raising initiative, we are creating a manual detailing how to start an aging consciousness raising group so that others can benefit from the work we are doing and to guide them in starting their own groups. Our experience is sometimes smooth flowing and other times bumpy. It is our intention to smooth out all the bumps before we pass the information along to others who have an interest in doing this work.

So, what do we talk about in these sessions? Sometimes we have a topic prepared so that members can reflect on it before we meet. Other times the issue that we begin talking about arises organically out of conversation…many times it is a question that someone asks or a situation in which they find themselves and feel that age or ageism is part of the problem. Recently, we spent two entire sessions on the topic of “help”…how we ask for help, how we offer help. Which is better…being independent or interdependent? Most of us were raised to value autonomy. The message was that we should be able to do everything by ourselves. To ask for help was a sign of weakness. As we age, do we still feel that way? What makes it easier for us to accept help? Many of us have experienced push back from our own parents when we determined that they could no longer function on their own.

We talk about the elders with whom we have had relationships and how those relationships shaped our thinking about aging. We share stories. We share our innermost feelings about our own aging. And, we talk about the advantages of being old and the contribution that older adults give to society. Sometimes we are exploring new territory, and sometimes we are looking at relics that are outdated. We have noted the conflation of the aged and the disabled. Does someone’s physical abilities make them either old or young? What about the older adult who has an expansive mind, always curious, always learning? Is she defined by her wrinkles or her mind? We are all guilty of ageism at one time or another.

I’ll end this with a personal story. My husband and I had the opportunity to be with old friends that we had not seen for a very long time. On the way home, our conversation started something like this; “Did you see Kathy? Doesn’t she look great!” “Yeah, but did you see Susan; she is not aging well at all?” “I can’t believe Joe uses a walker to get around. He was such a great athlete.” “But then there’s Dan who looks so young for his age.” In mid-sentence I stopped myself. “Can you believe where we are going with this conversation?” I asked. “What ageists we are”. The first thing we noticed was how young or how old everyone looked. No mention of who accomplished what or overcame obstacles in their lives.

We immediately went for the jugular because we are both in the same consciousness raising group.  We were able to catch ourselves and reflect on how automatically we were equating the way our friends looked with how old they are. Why does Dan have to look good for his age? Can’t he just look good! How do we know that Susan is not aging well? Just because she has more wrinkles on the outside has nothing to do with how she feels or who she is on the inside. We just automatically went into our own ageist rant.

Would we have recognized the ageist language we were using if we weren’t part of an ageing consciousness raising group? I doubt it. Finally, from another group member who had previously told us how she detested anyone who offered her a seat on the subway because it made her feel old. After only a couple of sessions, she said, “I actually accepted the offer of a seat on the train today,and I felt quite good about it. I don’t think I would have been so gracious if we had not been discussing these issues.”

“Who me, ageist?”

Join The Radical Age Movement on June 25th for some consciousness raising, and find out how ageist you are.

Start A Consciousness Raising Group

Learn how to start your own consciousness raising group in our free guide, Who Me, Ageist?

Ageism and The Dance of Marginality

by Alice Fisher, M.A., M.S.W.

“I know I’m going to get older. I can handle that.  I even know that I am going to die.  What bothers me the most, though, is the thought of becoming irrelevant.”  This statement was made by a 69 year old man who is a member of my consciousness raising group.

Old people are becoming less and less a minority in our country.  Quite to the contrary; today, approximately 18 per cent of people living in the United States are 60 years old and older. By 2050, people over 60 will make up over 25 per cent of the population…hardly a small minority.  When we marginalize a group of people, we are pushing them to the edge of humanity and according them lesser importance.  Their needs and desires are then ignored.  When ageism is in action, this is exactly what happens.  Ageist language and media portrayals of old people encourage this marginalization.

Ageism can be very subtle, or as one of my colleagues describes it, “slow-drip” oppression.  It creeps up on us, sometimes without our ever knowing we are being oppressed until we find ourselves in the outer margins of society.

Nobody wants to be pushed to the edge of society.  Yet, older adults teeter on this edge…always dancing on the line between inclusion and exclusion.  In today’s society pride in age is hard to find.  It’s no wonder that older people often hide their true age.  Stop for a moment, and ask yourself, “why?”  Many of us tend to think of this practice as vanity, but consider that the true answer may be fear…fear of becoming irrelevant.  So, what do we do?  We drink the “Kool-Aid” dispersed by the media and the anti-aging industry; the message is, If you don’t look young enough, you too will be marginalized.  Not only is the advertising deceptive, it is detrimental to our overall health.

Not wanting to be relegated to the outer margins, we support the anti-ageing industrial complex, spending hard-earned money on anti-aging products, medical and non-medical procedures, and cosmetic or plastic surgery.  When we do this, are we just satisfying our own vanity or are we hoping to buy a few more years of relevancy?  The dance of marginality seems to start younger and younger these days, with people in their forties and some even in their thirties seeking out a magic bullet that will make them seem to appear younger than their true age.  For those of us who are older, however, one day you are a vital contributing member of society and only a few wrinkles later, you are dancing on the margins again, trying to figure out how to get back to the other side before you are turned into a trivial appendage, maybe even a burden, to the current social order.

Ageism in itself can cause a more rapid decline of our physical and mental health as we edge  closer to the end of our lives.  Researchers have proven that older people who are constantly subjected to negative stereotypes of their age cohort often internalize these messages.  As a result of this internalized ageism, their own self esteem is affected; and this leads to both physical and mental health issues.  In addition, recent research has shown that those who accept their age and feel the wonderful combination of beauty and wisdom in their own selves are mentally and physically healthier than those who feel the pressure of having to conceal their true age.  Many of us just keep on dancing.

Who is doing all this dancing?  First and foremost are the “invisibles.”  The “invisibles” are healthy people between the ages of 60 and 80 who are not ready to “retire” in the way that traditional retirement has been socially constructed.  This cohort is the most skillful at the dance of marginality; they get in a lot of rehearsal time.  They know that if they don’t enter the dance contest, they will automatically lose. And, they can lose a lot.  Mostly, they can lose their financial security and, with that, their dignity.

You may have noticed that the age of the traditional concept of old has been pushed back quite a bit, with people living 10, 15, and some even 20 years longer than previous generations. In many ways the invisibles are in the prime of their lives.  Yet, they are constantly maneuvering to remain inclusive members of society. Most catastrophic is the cold shoulder they bear from American workforce.  If they are not still in their career jobs, they find themselves traveling a road that leads them closer and closer to the margins of society.

A lovely 85 year old woman came to visit me in my office one day.  She was carrying a rather large umbrella.  “Is it raining?,” I asked.  “No,” she replied; I just refuse to be seen using a cane.”  Even at 85, she is still dancing.  To appear completely autonomous is her goal.  Afraid to admit that she may need some help, she struggles to keep up the appearance for fear that she will not be perceived as the smart woman she is.  The way our society is constructed, it takes more courage to ask for help than it does to manage on our own regardless of the consequences. It is the American way, to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and rely only on yourself to get where you’re going.   Another octogenarian told me “if I show the slightest sign of  not being able to live independently, my children will whisk me into the nearest assisted living facility.”  She knows this, and so she dare not let her age show.  She, too, keeps on dancing.

Fear seems to be the main reason why so many of us are caught up in this dance of marginality. There are other times and other places where older adults have been embraced by society.  For so many, this is no longer true.  Old people are often segregated, put aside, or discarded completely. They are often treated as if they are diseased. We need to start changing the way we view and interact with the older adults around us. Old age is not contagious.

The ageing process, including the end of life, is part of the course of the lifespan.  Ageing is not a disease to be treated; it is a gift to be accepted.  It is an accomplishment to be proud of.  Older adults should not feel as though they have to “sing for their dinner,” nor should any of us have to “dance for our dignity.”

Interview with Alice Fisher, Co-Founder, The Radical Age Movement, and Steve Burghardt, Professor, Hunter College School of Social Work

https://vimeo.com/121137376

 

A Message from Alice Fisher

You may know me as the Director of Community Outreach for NYS Senator Liz Krueger, or you may have worked with me in the Senator’s office on issues that affect our senior constituents on quality of life or housing issues, or you may have attended one of our popular Roundtables for Boomers & Seniors. What you may not know is that for the past year and a half I have been working on my own initiative, The Radical Age Movement, outside of Liz’s office and with her full support.

WHAT IS THE RADICAL AGE MOVEMENT:

The Radical Age Movement is a grassroots nationwide effort that challenges traditional notions of aging.  Our long term goal is to create new social visions that will inspire and support people to grow and participate actively throughout their entire lives. No age-segregation or pitting generation against generation—we want a society that works for us all. Our short term goal is to bring awareness to the incessant ageism that permeates our youth-oriented society.

The Radical Age Movement was born out of my deep interest in longevity and its impact on society. One thing that became clear to me is that our longer life span has not added years onto the end of our lives but has opened a new stage of life for people between the ages of 60 and 80.  Once part of our nation’s cohort of seniors, these people are not ready to leave the workforce, play golf or bingo, nor be segregated from the intergenerational world around them. We are eager to keep on growing and learning, as well as mentoring and sharing our wealth of life experience. A big concern for this cohort is how we will be able to financially take care of our needs in this longer lifetime when the workforce has turned its back on us. We are a new cohort in the life span, so new that nobody knows what to call us. We don’t even know what to call ourselves. Sometimes we are the “old boomers” or the “young seniors” or the “leading edge”. Whatever we call ourselves, we are here to stay; and we need to raise our voices to make ourselves and our needs known.

The other driving factor for many of us is the recent caregiving experiences we have had or are having with helping our own parents navigate the end of some very long lives. Not liking the ageist attitudes that we have to battle to be sure that they receive the respect and care that they need, not to mention the financial resources that have gone beyond their own means, to help guide them to the end of life with the dignity and respect they deserve.

WHAT THE RADICAL AGE MOVEMENT HAS BEEN DOING:

This past fall, The Radical Age Movement (RA) went public with the launch of our website, www.theradicalagemovement.com. RA has had a busy 2015. We held two public events, one on January 13th, “Liberating the Power of Age, attended by over 100 people at the Ethical Culture Society of NY; and on February 21st  60 people attended a four hour “Age Café” workshop on ageism.

At both of our recent events, people shared their own stories of the difficulties they have confronted, or the humiliation and anger they have felt, in the face of ageism in the workplace, in healthcare, in the media, and often within their own families.

CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING AND BUILDING THE MOVEMENT:

Consciousness Raising (CR) is the method that is central to building our movement. This model of organizing–built around consciousness-raising groups where the ‘personal is political’– follows on the powerful work of the civil rights’, women’s, and LGBT movements, where small groups formed to discuss, understand, and acknowledge the mix of external and internal dynamics that contribute to a group’s marginalization and oppression. As those group members met and learned from each other over a number of months, they then came together to create a common campaign that united them all in joint action. This mix of personal development and political reform made lasting change as the movements grew from small numbers to a strong force capable of creating lasting change.

We have had many requests from people around NYC to join a CR group, and RA has decided to serve as a clearing house of sorts to help individuals either start their own or find and join a CR group that is forming.

For anyone who is interested, just email us at confrontingageism@gmail.com . Please be sure to put “ consciousness raising ” or “ CR” in t he subject of your email and include your home address . We are trying our best to connect people to groups that are in their geographic location. We, the steering committee of RA, have been participating in our own CR group for the past year. We have two additional groups forming now, one on the upper west side and one on the east side of Manhattan. We have people expressing interest from Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and as far away as Poughkeepsie. If your group is newly forming, one of RA’s steering committee members will be happy to attend your first meeting to help you get started. Our guide, “How to Start an Ageing Consciousness Raising Group” should be up on our website, www.theradicalagemovement.com, within the next two weeks.  Groups that want to get started before that  will be provided with advance copies of the guide.

MOVING FORWARD:

While these CR meetings are going on throughout March, April, and into May, the RA steering committee will be reviewing what larger campaign issue we wish to take on as our first initiative. A small sample of some of the suggestions that we are considering are: a campaign against an ageist ad campaign or other ageist me- dia representation of older adult; a politician who uses ageist language; a campaign to get news outlets to al- ter their language when identifying an older person, and many others. We will then bring all our CR groups together to choose such a campaign and map out next steps.

In short, we are doing just what the civil, women and gay rights’ movements did many years ago, using their lessons to guide and inspire us as we build our own movement here in the 21st century. This is an exciting prospect, built on lessons of the past and small steps by each of us in our own way. We know that some of you will become one of those emerging leaders who takes this step by hosting an evening CR session. And, we look forward to having the rest of you join us in this effort. Through such commitment, history is made.

March 9, 2015

Ageism in the Helping Professions: Over-Accommodating Perceived Weakness in Older Adults

The last place one would expect to find ageism well and flourishing is in the helping professions, particularly among those who devote their careers to working with, helping, and advocating for older adults.  And yet, we often see ageist attitudes prevail in these areas.  Not unnoticed are unintentional ageist practices in our own field of social work.  A director of casework at a large senior service agency told me; “There are social workers who come into the field wanting to ‘help’ without realizing that their attitude could be disempowering and contributing to widening the power differential.”  These social workers are over-accommodating for what they perceive as a lack or weakness among their elderly clients.

As social workers, we think of diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, gender and nationality.  Do we, however, experience the older people we work with as “the other”? We need to understand that these people who have lived their experiences through to almost a complete life are some of the most complex and interesting people we will ever encounter.  We may think we understand the experience of this “other”, but that is impossible.  The only way we can begin to understand older adults is to listen.  Listening is a primary skill when interacting with most people and is particularly salient when interacting with older adults.  There is much we can learn if we allow them to share their stories with us.  And, in order for that to take place, social workers and others working in the field of geriatrics, need to remember that these people have the same desire for autonomy and respect as the rest of us. Each time we over-accommodate for a perceived weakness in an elderly client, we disempower that client a little bit more.

One of the most prevalent ageist practices that takes place in senior environments is “elderspeak” or talking to older adults in the same way one speaks to a child.  This type of speech infantilizes the seniors with whom we interact.  Sweet baby talk does not pass muster with older adults, especially the oldest among us.  When a social worker talks condescendingly or uses “baby talk” to address an elderly person, we are guilty of making that elder feel like she is less than we are.  I once heard an aide greet my 92 year old dad with the words, “Don’t you look like a handsome young man today.”  This was executed with the same sing-song voice we would use when talking to a young child. As she walked away, my dad turned to me and said, “I don’t like that person.”

My dad resides in a senior care community where I visit quite often.  He has problems with his short term memory, gets confused, and cannot physically take care of himself.  Yet, he does not think of himself as less than any of the people around him.  He loves to tell stories and share experiences.  I know he will never do this with the person who reacts towards him as if he were a child.  Now, think of someone not as strong as my dad…someone frail and anxious.  This person is much more likely to internalize the baby talk and begin acting like the baby she is being told she is.

When we infantilize older adults, we are disempowering them.  We are compromising their autonomy.

Another form of over-accommodating is over-helping. A friend of mine who is 79 years old experienced two strokes in her seventies.  Although she was left with some speech and mobility issues, she worked very hard to overcome these challenges.  Today she has returned to her career as a college professor and researcher and lives an independent life.  Recently she told me about her trip to visit her daughter for Thanksgiving.  As it was, one of the guests at Thanksgiving dinner was a nurse who insisted on following my friend around throughout the day, prepared to catch her should she stumble or fall.  Knowing that the nurse’s intentions were well-meaning and not wanting to cause a scene, my friend accepted her “help” graciously.  However, she told me, “I was seething inside and desperately wanted to tell her to leave me alone!” She added, “If I needed her help, I was perfectly capable of asking for it”.

The same question arises.  Had my friend not been the strongly confident woman she is, she could have easily internalized the message of helplessness that was being covertly sent by this person who insisted on following her around.

We all know how it feels to take pride and a sense of accomplishment when we overcome obstacles in our lives.  Why would one think that need disappears when we age?  The situation above could have easily been handled by simply asking my friend if she required any assistance.  And, if the answer was “no thank you”, to accept it as the authentic answer to a heartfelt question.

These are powerful lessons for all of us when interacting with the older adults whom we work, as well as with the older adults in our lives.

What The Radical Age Movement Is and What It’s Not

My background in community organizing informed the founding The Radical Age Movement.  Community Organizers look at the world through a holistic lens.  We see the connections between systemic and personal issues.  While others are busy feeding the hungry, community organizers look to see WHY there are so many hungry Americans.  In today’s world, we need both kinds of activists.  We need people on the ground to give immediate aid to those in need, and we need others to try to find the cause of the need and to, hopefully, eradicate it.

Here’s a parable, author unknown, with a little adaptation by me that many of us who do community work are familiar with.

THE STORY OF THE RIVER

Once upon a time there was a small village on the edge of a river. The people there were all social work case workers, with the exception of one lone community organizer. Life in the village was good. One day a villager noticed a baby floating down the river. The villager quickly swam out to save the baby from drowning. The next day this same villager noticed two babies in the river. He called for help, and both babies were rescued from the swift waters. And the following day four babies were seen caught in the turbulent current. And then eight, then more, and still more!

The villagers organized themselves quickly, setting up watchtowers and training teams of swimmers who could resist the swift waters and rescue babies. Rescue squads were soon working 24 hours a day. And each day the number of helpless babies floating down the river increased. The villagers organized themselves efficiently. The rescue squads were now snatching many children each day. While not all the babies, now very numerous, could be saved, the villagers felt they were doing well to save as many as they could each day. Indeed, the village priest blessed them in their good work. And life in the village continued on that basis.

One day, however, the community organizer raised the question, “But where are all these babies coming from? Don’t you think we should go up river and find out where they are coming from?”  And so, the community organizer put together a team to head upstream to find out why these babies are being thrown into the river in the first place!”

We know that there are so many issues that affect older adults in our country; i.e., social security, Medicare, affordable housing, food insecurity, just to name a few.  We also know that there are many wonderful organizations which are addressing these specific issues.  We are not one of those organizations.

As The Radical Age Movement, we are the team that is heading upstream to find out WHY there are so many issues facing older adults in our society.

We are determined to get at the root causes of why older adults are not receiving the services they need…why their quality of life is constantly undermined by our government, our medical establishment, our workforce, the media, and in some cases, even by our own families.  We believe that the underlying cause for all these troubling concerns is AGEISM.

Simply put, ageism is prejudice  expressed toward anyone because of their age.  Although we can often recognize prejudice against young people, in this movement we are looking at prejudice expressed against older people.  Because we have all grown up in this extremely youth-oriented society, most of us harbor our own ageist tendencies.  Yet, while we fight racism, sexism, classism, etc., there is very little advocacy to address this prejudice.  When people are ageist, they are setting themselves up for prejudice against their own future selves.

Ultimately, we need new social visions that will inspire and support people to grow and participate actively throughout their entire lives.  No age segregation or pitting generation against generation—we want a society that works for all. We can’t leave it to experts to tell us how to age ‘well’ or ‘successfully’ or to an aging industrial complex that sees older adults as a dependent group or growing market of consumers.

To accomplish this, we must first expose the ageism that lies beneath and allows the exploitation of and prejudice against people merely because of their age.  This is what The Radical Age Movement is about.

 

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What’s Behind Midlife Malaise? The Happiness U-Curve And an Ageist Culture.

Nov 25, 2014 – 10:35 am

by Ashton Applewhite

 Last month the Atlantic magazine’s cover story described living past 75 as pretty darn inadvisable. Now, in quite the about-face, the December cover story champions the Happiness U-Curve (or “U-shaped Happiness Curve,” as I’ve been calling it, or “U-bend” in Britspeak): : thegrowing body of research showing, in writer Jonathan Rausch’s words, that “we reliably grow happier, regardless of circumstances, after our 40s.”

 

Caption: An analysis by the Brookings scholars Carol Graham and Milena Nikolova, drawing on Gallup polls, shows a clear relationship between age and well-being in the United States. Respondents rated their life satisfaction relative to the “best possible life” for them, with 0 being worst and 10 being best.

As Rausch explains, this curve emerges only after researchers have filtered out significant variables like income and marital and employment status to reveal the effect of age alone. People don’t reach 80 without facing adversity and loss, often crushing. They have more health problems too. But they also report far fewer of the kind of financial and personal issues that anger and worry younger people. In other words, this increased sense of well-being is not predominantly conferred by things that happen in life. It’s not reserved for Bodhisattvas or billionaires. It is deeply human, and rooted in biology.

The big takeaway for Rausch is the scientific fact that it’s hard to be happy when you’re middle aged. Titled “The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis,” the article is sprinkled with anecdotes about acquaintances whose trajectories mirrored Rauch’s own. During their 40’s, despite having achieved all kinds of material and professional successes, they were bushwhacked by upheavals and feelings of disappointment and discontent. Almost as bewilderingly, and also independent of circumstance, simply entering their 50’s conveyed increased feelings of calm and gratitude.

Perhaps the shift towards conscious contentment is based in endocrine changes or brain chemistry. German neuroscientists have found that healthy older people are less prone than younger ones to unhappiness about things they couldn’t change. Rausch describes becoming more accepting of his limitations and revising his expectations—and thus his measures of success and failure—accordingly. He labels this an “expectations gap,” and quotes Princeton economist Hannes Schwandt on the finding that the gap narrows with age. “[It] supports the hypothesis,” Schwandt writes, “that the age U-shape in life satisfaction is driven by unmet aspirations that are painfully felt during midlife but beneficially abandoned and felt with less regret during old age.”

Drawing on emerging cognitive science, Rausch calls this wisdom—and fervently wishes he’d found out about it in time to help him through his midlife doldrums. “What I wish I had known in my 40s (or, even better, in my late 30s) is that happiness may be affected by age, and the hard part in middle age, whether you call it a midlife crisis or something else, is for many people a transition to something much better—something, there is reason to hope, like wisdom.” I didn’t encountered the U-curve until my mid-fifties, at which point I figured they’d cornered two octogenarians, offered them fresh-baked cookies, then asked how they were feeling. Skepticism remains widespread even as corroborating evidence mounts. A 2011 study conducted by Laura Carstensen and colleagues at the Stanford Longevity Center found that “the peak of emotional life may not occur until well into the seventh decade”—and also that the finding is “often met with disbelief in both the general population and the research community.”

I’d recast the big story from one about dissatisfaction in midlife to one about happiness towards the end of life. That’s the message that American culture drowns out most loudly, although ageism shadows the whole life course. Messages about being “over the hill” at 40 are everywhere you look: greeting cards, advertisements, sitcoms. Internalized and unexamined, the notion that it’s all downhill after 40 makes it all the harder to weather that midlife trough. How much better, indeed, to challenge that absurd notion while we’re still young, and to be sustained from then on by the knowledge that with age comes happiness.

Author and journalist Ashton Applewhite has been writing about aging and ageism since 2007 in blog form at This Chair Rocks. During this period she’s become a Knight Fellow, a New York Times Fellow, and a Columbia Journalism School Age Boom Fellow. The voice of Yo, Is This Ageist?, Ashton has been recognized by the New York Times as an expert on ageism. In 2013 eminent cultural critic Margaret Gullette described her as “a public intellectual with a fresh voice in age studies.” Risa Breckman, Executive Director of the NYC Elder Abuse Center, says, “Applewhite’s thinking is deep, her passion infectious, and her cogent message is spot on: we urgently need to have a national conversation about ageism to raise awareness about it and to stop it.” 

1/13/15 Event Wrap-Up – The Radical Age Movement Comes Out

January 14, 2015

The Radical Age Movement held its first public event last evening at the New York Ethical Culture Society.  One hundred people came out in the freezing cold to hear about what it takes to “leverage the power of age”.

The evening began with a welcome from Dr. Phyllis Harrison-Ross, Chairperson of the Social Service Board of the New York Ethical Culture Society.

Alice Fisher, founder of The Radical Age Movement, then talked about the need for people who don’t like the way that old people are portrayed and regarded in what she described as the “youth oriented culture of the United States” need to speak up.  Alice told of her deep interest in longevity and its multiple effects on society and how this led her to the founding of The Radical Age Movement.

“I came to the realization that the extra years many of us will be living are not tacked on to the end of our lives.  Rather, a whole new stage of life has opened up along the life span, and those are people between approximately 60 and 80 years of age who are still a vital and relevant part of our society.”  “We”, said Fisher who is 69 years old, “are not ready to throw in the towel.”  After being asked, “how do you change an entire culture”, her response was “with a movement.  It’s the only way we’ve ever done it.”  Right then and there the seed for The Radical Age Movement was planted.

After working for over a year with a small 10 person steering committee and launching a website a few months ago, The Radical Age Movement was ready to come out.  “When people leave their career positions, whether by choice or not by choice, they walk into a void”, she said.  “There is no role for us in society, unless we want to accept the description of old just because we are collecting social security.”  People of this age, although older, are not ready to be consigned to the rocking chair. “Nobody even knows what to call us.  Sometimes we’re the old boomers or the young seniors.  We don’t even know what to call ourselves”, said Fisher.

The original agenda for last evening’s event included a participatory demo of what it is like to be part of an age-oriented consciousness raising group.  Not expecting such a large turnout and without enough facilitators to guide the number of groups that would be necessary to run this part of the program as planned, Radical Age decided to let the program run with interactive discussion.  After a presentation about ageism by Joanna Leefer, 65, a care-giving consultant, three people gave personal testimony about their own confrontation with ageism, while two others testified to the effect that participating in consciousness raising around the topic of age has had on the way they are experiencing ageing.

Corinne Kirchner, 79, who is a sociology professor at Columbia University and  who experienced two strokes in her 70’s, talked about the way that people constantly try to give her too much help.  She described Thanksgiving dinner where a nurse who was a guest at the dinner followed her around, prepared to catch Corinne should she fall. Understanding that the nurse was trying to be kind, Corinne was very polite but “inside I was so angry that this person was treating me like a child learning to walk.”

Hope Reiner, 70, the founder of “Hope Cares”, a companion service that provides one-on-one stimulation, socialization and engagement to older adults, talked about her abrupt dismissal from the consumer magazine publishing world where she worked for over 33 years. “Despite the magazines’ high ratings and high revenue and my standing as the #1 salesperson for much of that time”, she told the audience, “my career ended. I can only assume my dismissal was based on my age.”

Next it was Rodger Parsons’ turn to talk about his personal experience with ageism.  Roger, 68 years old, does voiceovers for Radio, TV, Cable commercials and writes and does voiceovers for other venues.   He spoke about how ageism is especially relevant in the Voice Over world and ways of dealing with it. “It is especially important to confront situations as directly as possible to get outcomes that make it clear that access to work should be based on the talent of the performer not the performer’s age.”

After each of these testimonies, lively discussions from the audience ensued.  People shared their own experiences or commented on the testimony they had just heard.

Alice then took the podium and gave a brief description of the consciousness raising process that The Radical Age steering committee has been using. “The one advantage to participating in this process”, she said, is providing participants the space and time to examine our own ageist tendencies”.  “After all”, said Fisher, “we did grow up in this youth oriented society.”  The Radical Age Movement is developing a guide for people who want to start their own consciousness raising group around the topic of age.  This guide will be posted to The Radical Age Movement’s website, www.theradicalagemovment.com, in the coming weeks and be distributed at their next event on February 21^st.

Barbara Harmon, 72, a speech language pathologist, and Jon Fisher, 70, artist and real estate broker, then testified to the changes that participating in the consciousness raising process has made for each of them.

Barbara spoke of how she came to accept the graciousness of those who offer her seats on crowded subways after coming to the realization that her own ageist attitude was getting in the way of her being able to accept aid when offered.  “Accepting a seat acknowledges the fact that my age is recognized; but because of the discussion and support of my peers, I now feel comfortable with the recognition”.

Jon talked about his career in the ad business where everything had to be new and fresh, including the people.  “I had the mindset that I had to look, act, and feel young; and I carried that with me into my personal life.  When I was invited to join the consciousness raising group, I really didn’t think that my ideas about ageing would ever change.  Now, I also feel more comfortable in my age.  The consciousness raising process has made a major imprint on who I am and who I am becoming”.

Remarks and conversation continued until it was time to leave.  Alice asked everyone to take a save-the-date for The Radical Age Movements next event on February 21^st.  This will be a 4 hour workshop entitled “The Age Café.”  Through this process, those who attend will have the opportunity to help plan Radical Age’s agenda going forward.

Reacting to Alice’s expression of disappointment at not being able to preo as planned, one attendee said that  the evening was one huge gestalt consciousness raising session.   Another comment by a member of the steering committee was, “I think we have the start of a real movement here.”  That expression was echoed by many who attended the event.

The Last Acceptable Prejudice in America

by Alice Fisher, M.S.W.

Last week Bill Maher’s closing editorial comments were about ageism, identifying it as the ‘last acceptable prejudice in America’.  Ageism might be more accurately described as the ‘least acceptable prejudice in America’.  Why?  When a person uses ageist language, he is expressing prejudice against himself.  Age, after all, is a goal we aspire to; it is a goal, if we are fortunate, that we will achieve.  And, yet, in our youth focused and youth obsessed society, the message we get is more like “be careful what you wish for.”

If one is fortunate enough to reach old age and become a repository for all the wisdom that living a long life imparts, one must also be prepared to become the subject of incessant stereotyping and ridicule that accompanies growing old in a culture that imparts the message that young equals good, while old equals bad.

What should older people like Jerry Brown do with all the knowledge they have accumulated?   Shall they take their years of experience with them into a world where young and old are segregated so that the knowledge of the old cannot contaminate the eagerness of the young?  Generativity, the ability of the old passing on knowledge and experience to the young, was once the pride of generations.  Today, it seems that every new cohort of human beings can ‘do it themselves’.

What, I began to think, would a world be like with no old people?  For the purpose of pondering this question, let’s define old as anyone over 65.  Remember, when they leave, they take all their years of experience and wisdom with them.  After all they worked hard to achieve it all.  It belongs to them.  Next, they take all of the wisdom passed down from past generations with them also.  They had no opportunity to pass it on, so they may as well keep it.  It may come in handy.

With no people over 65, there would be no way to see the magnificent lines of experience and wisdom that symbolize a full life lived. If we lived in a society that had no people over 65, we would never have the opportunity to know the possibility of fulfillment from helping a loved one who is at the end of a full life lived.  Nobody in a society that excludes older adults would have to be confronted with their own ageing…no gray hair, no wrinkles, no walkers, no age spots, no diminishment of abilities.  And, best of all for American society, we would never have to face our own death…or, at the least, we would be able to put it off as long as possible.

When I was 15 years old my grandfather passed away, and my grandmother came to live with us.   I loved to join her in her room in the evenings and listen to the stories of “the old country”.  She told me about coming to America.  She filled me with stories about my mom and her brothers and sister growing up in Brooklyn and stories about her own brothers and sister, my great aunt and uncles.  She taught me how to bake the same cookies that her mother taught her, and  I just recently passed the recipe down to my own granddaughter.  Most precious of all was the unconditional love that she bestowed upon me and the rest of our family. All of these experiences certainly had a great impact in shaping who I am today.  When she did become ill and knew that her life was coming to an end, she gave me the gift of learning about death which included the message that it was okay.

If we lived in a world where there were no older adults, the best of some of the world’s greatest thinkers would remain unknown, with nothing for future generations to build on.   There would be no Grandma Moses,  no success for Mahatma Ghandi.  Nations would have no access to the experience of a Golda Mier or a Nelson Mandela. We would never experience the complete genius of a Benjamin Franklin or a Charles Darwin.  We would never know what a full life could mean. Everyone would leave a life cut short.

We need to consider the wonderful, and sometimes great, gifts that older people give to our society, our communities, and not the least, to our families.  Below is just a short sample of some of the wonderful contributions we have received from the older adults who had the privilege of living and sharing a full life.

At 100, Grandma Moses was painting.

At 94, Bertrand Russell was active in international peace drives.

At 93, George Bernard Shaw wrote the play Farfetched Fables.

At 91, Eamon de Valera served as president of Ireland.

At 91, Adolph Zukon was chairman of Paramount Pictures.

At 90, Pablo Picasso was producing drawings and engravings.

At 89, Mary Baker Eddy was directing the Christian Science Church.

At 89, Arthur Rubinstein gave one of his greatest recitals in New York’s Carnegie Hall.

At 89, Albert Schweitzer headed a hospital in Africa.

At 88, Pablo Casals was giving cello concerts.

At 88, Michaelangelo did architectural plans for the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli.

At 88, Konrad Adenauer was chancellor of Germany.

At 85, Coco Chanel was the head of a fashion design firm.

At 84, Somerset Maugham wrote Points of View.

At 83, Aleksandr Kerensky wrote Russia and History’s Turning Point.

At 82, Winston Churchill wrote a History of English Speaking People.

At 82, Leo Tolstoy wrote I Cannot Be Silent.

At 81, Benjamin Franklin effected the compromise that led to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.

At 81, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe finished Faust.

At 80, George Bums won an Academy Award for his performance in The Sunshine Boys.

Avery, A. C., et al. Successful Aging. New York. Ballantine Books, 1987.

What is Ageism?

By Sheila Roher, MPH

Ageism refers to discriminatory or prejudiced behavior and attitudes towards people based solely on age.  Ageism causes the systematic mistreatment and marginalization of people based on age alone, just as racism and sexism does so based on categories of skin color and gender.

History

Dr. Robert Butler, the first Director of the National Institute on Aging, coined the term in 1969 at a time when our growing recognition of racism and sexism was fueling social change.  But he first recognized decades earlier when, as a young and idealistic medical student, he was horrified to witness his fellow residents and students routinely refer to older people as “geezers” and “old witches” and trivialize their very real needs. Since then, many activists and researchers have documented the pervasive presence of ageist stereotypes in social attitudes, practices, and policies.

Age-based stereotypes: what are they?

The most common ageist stereotypes are negative, reflecting the ageist assumptions that all or most older adults are demented, weak, incompetent, disabled, or cranky.

• How often have you seen someone speak to an elderly person as they would to a child? Or speak loudly assuming that all older adults have hearing impairments? Or assume that if a young adult loses forgets something, they are simply forgetful but label the same behavior in an older person as ‘senile’?

A few stereotypes are superficially positive, such as the “cuddly and cute little old lady” stereotype. But these stereotypes also disempower older adults because they discourage people from treating them as capable adults with the usual human range of complex capacities, attitudes, and needs.

The price we all pay for ageism

Ageism—which permeates our social practices, behaviors, polities, and attitudes—hurts all of usFrom an individual perspective, these beliefs and assumptions can ‘get under our skin’ and create the very outcomes we fear.

• A study by Yale researcher Becca Levy and colleagues followed several hundred older adults for more than two decades. Researchers found that people who had internalized more negative attitudes towards aging were significantly more likely to suffer impairments and need nursing home care, and died on average 7-1/2 years earlier than people with more negative attitudes towards aging.

From a societal perspective, ageism causes us to accept discriminatory practices as ‘natural’:

• Just as we ‘assumed’ (with lots of social training and cues) that housing and employment should be based on skin color, we accept that older people should be segregated in special housing (to “help” them) and fail to protest hiring practices discriminate against older adults.

From a generational perspective, ageism places enormous pressures on young people to achieve everything in the first half of their adulthood (and somehow save enough to fund a forty-year retirement) and prevents the full participation, potential for growth, and engagement of older adults in all aspects of culture.

Ageism prevents us from developing an affirmative vision for a full human life and a vital multigenerational society.

How do we change it?

Individually and culturally, we need to:

1. Recognize ageism (in ourselves as well as in social practices and policies) by raising our own awareness and consciousness;
2. Challenge ageist assumptions and stereotypes through education, advocacy, and protest;
3. Develop new social maps that embrace our full human journey, including the second half of adulthood.