The Wise Men and Women Who Transcend Time, or: Why the Term ‘Senior Citizen’ Is So Last Century

Two requests: May companies end the policy of mandatory retirement, when workers turn 65 or 70? And may we also do away with the term senior citizen, which denotes seniority without wisdom and agedness without vitality?

Indeed, these questions should be rhetorical by nature, not an earnest plea for organizations to embrace common sense and for society to choose intelligence over inexperience.

And yet, the requests are real because the problems we face are as real as reality itself.

So, in a nation in the midst of great upheaval, and in a world ravaged by war, terror, famine and environmental catastrophe, why would we consign some of our brightest people to spend their time shuffling cards and playing shuffleboard? Why would we ask the eyewitnesses to history to close their minds because of the number of candles on a birthday cake?

The idea is even more ridiculous when we consider the events of the Second World War. There, speeding through the brown water of the Thames, with the great smokestacks of factories in the background and approaching the grandeur of London’s most famous icons, Westminster Bridge, Big Ben and Parliament, look – seated is a 65-year-old man, bald save a few wisps of faded ginger-colored hair, a senior citizen on a boat ride with his wife (her hair is white); an elderly couple in a black and white photograph, which, sadly, is unrecognizable to most high school and college students.

The man is Winston Churchill, newly appointed prime minister of Great Britain, who wrote (upon assuming power):

“I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.”

Should the citizens of the United Kingdom have rejected their leader?

Should King George VI have withheld his assent, when Parliament dissolved itself of appeasement and Mr. Churchill traveled to Buckingham Palace to present his credentials as the Prime Minister of a wartime cabinet?

Should there have been a loud echo of negation all because of Churchill’s age?

Now, as you can see, these questions are as ridiculous as they sound.

In Churchill, we have, simply and quite rightly, a man.

We have many women – and men – who can enrich the world, provided we show these individuals respect and not treat them as a moral salve for own guilt. Or: These people can cross the street themselves, thank you for very much, and they do not believe their age is good for nothing more than discounted movie tickets and an early bird special.

I write these words because I, too, am a “senior citizen”. But I neither act nor feel “old” because, well, I do not know what that is, at least not yet.

I do not, therefore, need pity from an advertiser who deems my generation “undesirable” or “irrelevant,” when, in fact, it is someone else’s ignorance that is unappealing and whose attitude is pointless.

Give me insight independent of age, so I can heal my portion of the world.

Let us give ourselves the encouragement to improve humankind without regard to race, religion, sex or age.

Let us remind ourselves that a country that obsesses about age, but knows nothing about numbers, is as innumerate as it is illiterate.

Which is to say, had Albert Einstein abandoned his work because of his repatriation to America and the passage of his youth, had he stopped theorizing about the cosmos and left his equations unfinished – all because of the false stigma of age – we would have been unworthy of welcoming him to our shores.

We need great leaders, teachers, judges and sages.

They are ready to serve.

Give them their due, but do not call them senior citizens

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