You want to talk about age? Ageing? Getting old? Okay, Let’s do it, but please don’t use statistics. Statistics do NOT represent everyone.
My husband Alan is the perfect weight for his height. He’s six feet tall and carries 174 pounds on his slender frame. He’s sharp, he’s a runner, and recently we climbed the 180-foot falls, (straight up, no stopping), in Dunns River, Jamaica. He’s also 74 years old.
A few weeks ago, someone from his doctor’s office called to confirm his yearly check-up. But it wasn’t a nice, polite call because the clerk on the other end, after stating that the call was from the doctor’s office, asked me if I was his caregiver. What?!
After telling her that I was his wife and I could confirm the appointment, I asked her why she had asked if I was his caregiver. “Oh,” she said, “I just looked at his age. You know, statistics.”
Shocked, and angry, I retorted that “not everyone over the age of 65 is a demented, drooling idiot”, then asked to speak with her supervisor who was appalled that someone would ask that question and immediately apologized.
Now, someone other than yours truly would have laughed it off and put the mistake down to a younger woman making a stupid assumption and let it go but I couldn’t. I pursued it with the supervisor because I felt it was important. You cannot assume or use statistics to judge people of a certain age. We are all different. What that clerk had done was pure and simply ageist.
While statistics may provide valuable insights, they’re all based on probabilities and not exact science. Statistics are a way to validate a point of view. In other words, statistics are part of a guessing game that does not take into account the individual.
Dr. Jon La Pook said, “If a doctor sees an 80 year-old man, he’s seen ONE eighty-year-old man.”
The meaning is clear—that 80 year-old man does not represent every man who is 80.
I think we all need to take age discrimination very seriously. The actor Jane Darwell looked completely different at the age of 70 than does actor Meryl Streep at the same age. Certainly, we look vastly different than our grandparents did at the age we are now.
I will rage against age discrimination, and I won’t be polite about it because ageism seems to be not only one of the last socially acceptable prejudices but is also now being used unfairly as a political weapon.
The numbers, and the damned statistics that stubbornly cling to them, do not take anything else into consideration when judging age. That has to stop. It must.
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