Stuff I'm reading

Does “hate speech” sound strong? One Facebook group description stated that anyone “over the age of 69 should immediately face a firing squad.” It wasn’t the only group to reach for a gun. Others recommended banning older people from activities like driving or shopping.

First a bit of a rant. The tags for this interview with visionary activist Maggie Kuhn are: Aging gracefully (twice, in case you don’t get the hang of it in one go), Kuhn, Gray Panther(s), Meaning, Potential, and Purpose. Where on earth is Ageism?  Interviewer Ken Dychtwald is a high-profile gerontologist and marketer, writing here for the  Huffington Post, hardly an internet backwater. How much longer will ageism remain missing from the mainstream mindset?

Two New York Times editorials this week have me gnashing my teeth. Columnist David Brooks thinks the best way to nurture investment would be to “take spending that currently goes to the affluent elderly and redirect it to the young and the struggling.” He cites policymaker Yuval Levin’s proposal to means-test Medicare proposal, which would reduce benefits to olders with higher lifetime earnings.

Until I read this article on the New York Times Well Blog, I had no idea that hearing loss linked to a variety of health problems, most notably dementia. It cites a longitudinal study that found that “compared to individuals with normal hearing, those individuals with a mild, moderate, and severe hearing loss, respectively, had a 2-, 3- and 5-fold increased risk of developing dementia [emphasis mine] over the course of the study.”

I stole this title from an article on the Senior Planet website about the fact that half of Connecticut’s HIV-positive population is over 50. Connecticut hasn’t cornered the market. By 2015 more than half of all people living with HIV in the US will be over 50.

That’s the title of a piece by Tim Kreider on the New York Times Opinionator blog, and I hope it’s not news to everyone who passed me the link. Some of Krieder’s other eye-popping observations: you’re not getting any younger. You have to say goodbye to your childhood home. The old and infirm are pretty much missing from movies and TV. (There’s a term for that: symbolic annihilation.)

Let’s hope John Boenher isn’t chatting with Taro Aso any time soon. Almost a quarter of Japan’s population is over 60 years old, and on January 21 Japan’s new finance minister suggested that they should be allowed to "hurry up and die" because of the cost of their medical care. Icing the cake, Aso referred to patients who can no longer feed themselves as "tube people.”