Upon realization of my advanced Aging!

Today I had sort of an epiphany, I am OLD!

Sure I have had birthday celebrations with family and friends and each time the celebration shouted about another year of life ending and a new year beginning. So far, I have been having birthdays for 82 years and in a few months will again celebrate that time and turning 83!

I hear folks continue to discuss the capability of our current president, Joseph Biden and the fact that he is over 80 years and should retire after his current term in office. They say that he is too old to run for re-election to the presidential office of our country. Well, I don’t think Joe is too old, hell I am his age and I have no problem making decisions of worth, nor do I feel that I am past the point of being a contributor to our society of Americans.

But, some folks have their opinions and I have mine. Mine being based on the actual fact that I am Joe Biden’s age and don’t feel that my abilities have gone south. I continue my efforts in the information technology field, not gainfully employed but active on a personal satisfaction stage. Oh sure, I have the aches and pains that come with an aging body, but my mind is still sharp, I still concentrate and foster ideas. I can still drive my automobile, although I can’t ride a bicycle (but then I wasn’t EVER very good at riding a bicycle) but I can still take walks, remain mobile in various ways, and can still use my electronic gadgets like my computers, my Fire electronic books, and of course the always there mobile phone.

Ageism is a form of discrimination and it is rather clearly imposed by those folks who express their unhappy feelings about the age of our President. I don’t feel that way, because I have always been a person who looks at achievement and works rather protestations of their goals, ideas and other speechifying claptrap. I have seen men and women in their 20s to 40s who performed marvelous works of science, business, politics, and above all, compassion, and have witnessed those same age groups founder in their efforts, dismiss entire segments of our population and make a mess of their environment. By the same token, I have witnessed the same actions and attributes with men and women in their 50s through 80s. So spare me the idiocy of using ageism to determine whether a person is qualified to run for any political office. Having said that, I would also expect people in positions of responsibility to recognize when it is time for their departure.

I also would point out that many are those who live very long lives and are productive along the way. My ancestry included a great, great, great grandmother who didn’t know how old she was, but from her relating her life experiences, we estimated her age at between 98 and 113, most probably 110. A key factor in our computation of her birth was that she remembered the “march of death” which we ascribed to part of the later years of the forced migration now described as the Trail of Tears. I was a child of 10 years when she passed. She was a child of the Cherokee nation, during the forced migration of her people from Georgia to Oklahoma by the then government of the United States. Her parents left the march at late night somewhere in today’s Arkansas and eventually settled in the Northwestern Louisiana and Eastern Texas region. There she was married to a Texas farmer/rancher who had migrated from Virginia and settled in what is now the ArkLaTeX area where Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana borders meet.

Their marriage was the beginnings of our family (my maternal family). The main memory I have of that lady was that even though she had outlived her own children, she was still mobile and active in her life. She lived, after their lands were lost, with a succession of grand children, eventually with my grandfather. Still worked in her garden, still “put up” canned foods for the winter or other hard times. She saw much of our country’s history, and would relate those points in “stories” to us children. She saw three major wars, from the Civil War, World War I and World War II. She lived through the Great Depression, and the prosperity following the war times. She was there when the automobile was invented, lived without electricity, indoor plumbing and plowed their land using mules and a hand held plowshare.

She was cognizant of her surroundings for her entire life, and had the ability to care for herself right up until two years before her passing. She died in 1951 and the world was lessened by her leaving. And as old as she was, there was never any doubt of her cognitive ability. Woe betide anyone who made out that she was OLD and INFIRM.

One of the most productive and instructive people I have ever known was a man who was a Systems Engineer and an adjunct professor of computer science. He held positions in the design of business applications into his late 70s and taught his computer science classes into his early 80s. He was a team lead/project manager in a company where I once worked and I audited some of his classes in the computer sciences. He was always available for telephone conversations even following his final retirement at 86. He would consult with us and other development teams and provide insight and directional focus for many projects that I worked on or that my peers worked. I spent many evenings in discussions with him regarding some of the systems functions we were attempting to design and build. He made a mean, delicious cup of coffee and laughed readily, and had a whimsical sense of humor. He passed at 89 from complications from a fall and just days before he had participated in a teleconference call helping to develop a functional design document for a new automation system in the financial area. So, spare me all this talk about being too old to be productive.

If Joe Biden actually stays as the Democratic Presidential candidate, he will certainly have my vote because he has done an excellent job as President so far contrary to the misinformation from the right wingers and today’s corporate owned news media.

We may be older, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we are no longer of value or are mentally competent.