Page 14 RAIN June 1978 Nothing about our culture seems so deliberately destructive as what we say and do about age. At a time when a conscious emphasis hc,1.s been placed upon youth, too many people have grown to view old age as total decline and defeat in life. This sort of attitude has fed a host of stereotypes revolving around feeble-minded old timers who've somehow outlived their usefulness. Is it any wonder with this sort of degradation that old people get pushed out of their jobs and families and channelled into menial tasks or "homes" where they are supposed to sit and wait? More than we might willingly admit, our attitudes about aging are a sign of how we view our world and ourselves; recognizing the way we treat our elders is to acknowledge the cultural distortion of a system that replaces personal attention with television sets and spawns unresponsive institutions like so many surrogate authority figures. Without some wisdom passed down in our daily lives by old people in our midst, our culture risks the danger of becoming disconnected from its own past and hopelessly fragmented. This makes a believable future that much more uncertain. At the bottom line, fear of the future is nothing more than fear of age. My own attitudes about age have changed quite a bit in the last few years as a mix of my social concerns and personal experiences have interacted with each other. The opportunity to be among the people of the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana three summers ago helped to spark my consciousness about the wisdom of age and its importance to our survival. Since that time I've somewhat abandoned the belief that all that is progressive must necessarily be a denial of traditions and the past. Ecological wisdom seems to argue that it isn't that simple. It seems that traditional, non-Western societies, inasmuch as they survive and endure today's high-speed change, still observe and respect the connectedness of all things and view the Whole as something quite sacred. It's not surprising that in such a setting knowledge and wisdom-rather than data and information-are highly valued, and that elders as the keepers of history are honored for their wisdom. With such stature the elder is placed at the center of the community, rather than on the periphery. Many things flow from this source: as a link with the past, the elder represents the continuity of his/her people through time and across generations-the fact that life precedes and survives the limit of one's own birth and death. This connectedness is seen in space as well as time: as a symbol of wisdom the elder is often known as grandparent to the entire community, whether directly related or not. In such extended patterns of caring, the welfare of the whole society is reinforced and strengthened. Beyond this is the general trust that the community will place in the elder's wisdom to know what can be believed or sustained. E. F. Schumacher said that the central concept of wisdom is permanence. In this sense the strong link between wisdom and age helps the community to equip itself morally for ecological survival. In fact, it may well be that the cultures which retain a wholistic worldview and a respect for the wisdom of age will be instrumental in the survival of us all. Time will tell. Permanence, on the other hand, is hardly a strong point of the industrial culture that predominates, despite its overpowering dimensions. In fact it is having great difficulty projecting its hard-edged expectations onto the future. Our data banks may be stuffed with information and literacy may be close to universal, but that sense of continuity seems ever
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