Listen to your elders

#CY365 prompt for the day is "listen."  Another odd prompt to capture as an image.  Of course, none of us plan on aging, it just happens to us.  I count myself lucky to be alive and well with each passing year. 

I have decided to highlight a few interesting sites.  The first is www.helpage.org which recently hosted the International Day of Older Persons on October 1st.  

Age discrimination and ageism are still tolerated across the world and urgent action is needed to stop it.

Older people experience discrimination and violation of their rights at family, community and institutional level. They remain invisible in existing human rights law which means their rights are not sufficiently protected.

Age is just a number reporting on whats-new-in-ageing-and-aged-care. 
 

The next site is seniorplanet.org - aging with attitude.  

  “It is as though the aged were an alien race to which the young will never belong. Indeed, there is a distinct discrimination against the old…. It is not just cruelty and indifference that underscore the obsolescence of the old. It is also the nature of modern western culture.” —Time magazine, August 1970.  

What was new for seniors 45 years ago?

• Ageism in the workplace. Forty percent of the unemployed were over 45, which was older then than it is now, life expectancy-wise. (We’ve seen some improvement: a little less than 38 percent of workers 45 and up were unemployed in the last quarter of 2012.)
• Senior poverty. One in four seniors lived at or below the poverty line. According to Time 45 years ago, “Most are bewildered and bitter nouveau pauvres, their savings and fixed incomes devoured by spiraling property taxes and other forms of inflation” — the ’70 version of market crash. (Fifteen percent of seniors lived below the poverty line in 2013.)
• Stereotyping. The idea that sickness is an inevitable part of aging, that older people are cognitively slower, that only young people are interested in sex  — Time challenged these 45 years ago. They still haunt us now.
• Single-generation housing. The “amazing phenomenon” of older Americans, treated like outsiders, clustering together in new towns that exclude those under 65: retirement communities with their shuffleboard, bowling and clubs. (Today, the Villages in Florida is the fastest growing town in the U.S.)