Third Age
October 2013
It’s Time: for a new party
On the rare occasions that politicians mentioned “The Aged” in the recent election, it was clear that they didn’t have a clue beyond mentioning a granny in a nursing home (politician pulls long, sad face) or the “ageing population,” which to them meant hordes of old people about to suck up the nation’s resources (politician shows worried, put-upon face).
I detected an occasional hesitation before a politician kissed a baby. In the UK, political writers are suggesting that politicians forget about kissing babies, who don’t vote, and “sidle up” instead to old people who do.
Sidle up? Sidle off, I say. Let’s have a Party. We need The Old People’s Party.
No “grey power” nonsense”: if you start with a cutesy hair stereotype or a genteelism you won’t get the feisty old people we need to get this country moving or the increasing numbers of old people who are about to make a bigger than ever contribution to our nation. Old People’s Party is strong and uncompromising. Old People’s Action Party might be better.
It’s just the time to bring this up. People are moaning about the proliferation of small political parties, but it’s the ballot papers and the preference system that may need reform. The last thing we want is to quash the efforts of people in our lively democracy to express their needs by forming a political party. How about that political pundit fellow on Meet the Press on September 15, who was shocked that parties he’d “never even heard of” were on the ballot paper? Since when did you have to pass his test of acquaintance to stand for parliament? It sounded suspiciously like parliament is for “our sort of people”.
The Old People’s Action Party should knock some sense into those who think the old are either a burden or taking up jobs that belong to the young. It is often thought that only volunteer work is appropriate to Third Agers. Think again. I was interviewed recently by a university researcher who is finding that old people can and do have jobs into their 90s. They just fly below the radar. If everyone were not obsessed with Alzheimer’s (which the young assume that you have the first time you forget their boring names), job-seeking by the old and fit would be common.
In July, The New York Times reported on studies in the UK and Denmark that showed that dementia rates among people aged 65 and older are falling – “sharply”. Experts claim the studies confirm what they had suspected but had had difficulty proving: “that dementia rates would fall and mental acuity improve as the population grew healthier and better educated.”
“The incidence of dementia is lower among those better educated, as well as among those who control their blood pressure and cholesterol… So as populations controlled cardiovascular risk factors better and had more years of schooling, it made sense that the risk of dementia might decrease.” And this, it is claimed, is now proven.
It meant, said one Alzheimer’s researcher at Duke University, that the common assumption that every successive generation would have the same risk for dementia did not hold true.
So society is going to have a whole lot of bright old things on its hands. And we learn this just when governments have not solved the problem of stashing hordes of mentally impaired old people away in suitable ghettos. Just when they were starting to work out how little they could get away with doing for the aged demented.
Dr Dallas Anderson, of the US National Institute on Aging said, “…we are beginning to see that more and more of us will have a chance to reach old age cognitively intact, postponing dementia or avoiding it altogether. That is a happy prospect.”
But what are all these cognitively intact old people going to do with their days? Create and join their own political parties perhaps. Advocating jobs for all. Quotas of old people on boards and in universities and the cabinet… for a start.
Sidle up, it’s going to be fun.
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