03/01/2024
Breaking news: “Candidate disqualified for being too female/dark/agnostic/gay.”
Of course we would never disqualify someone on any of those grounds. But we presently find ourselves in an open, unabashed, tone deaf, and collectively biased rant to disqualify people from public service simply for being “too old”, whatever that is supposed to mean.
CBS News put out a poll recently that asked if the two front runners in the presidential race were “too old”. They didn’t ask if they were “too incompetent”, or “too unethical”; just if they are “too old”. This is breathtaking ageism that assumes that age automatically leads to incompetence or questions about character.
The obvious question is not whether anyone is too old for office, but if they are fit for office, at any age. And the overwhelming number of people proven to be unfit, either before they were elected, or after, have almost all been under the age of 60. Conflating age with fitness to serve is as biased and unfounded as any of the other forms of discrimination we would never entertain in today’s world.
As the following article suggests, ageism is not just socially acceptable, it’s as easy a condemnation to make today as it was thirty plus years ago when we suggested a woman’s place is in the kitchen. Thanks to a couple widely described “old” guys running for President, ageism has picked up steam and is running rampant in the public discourse, with almost no push back. Discrimination is alive and well once again.
It’s time to stop this, and put the focus back on the only conversations that matter for qualifying a candidate: character and competence, neither of which have any essential ties to age.
Eight Presidents died in office. Their average age was 58, ranging from 49 to 68. The average age of the three Presidents who were impeached was under 64; at 59, 61 and 74 respectively. If you want to ensure candidates are going to make it through four years, and do so with integrity and competence, it has nothing to do with being “too old”. That is a lazy qualifier that has no definition to it, and serves only to rile the masses against whomever they think conveniently fits that description to them. Such broadly sweeping descriptions of an entire class of people is the foundation of all discrimination, and is nothing short of dangerous.
Many younger members of Congress have been expelled for fundamental character flaws that showed up in unethical or illegal behavior, a pattern of hatefulness or intolerance, or a simple pattern of lying. Younger people are also regularly passed over for office for a lack of competence or experience (a form of incompetence). Some politicians have had to step aside because their competence declined, either by their own hand, the hand of others who inflicted wounds on them, or by sheer medical chance. This has happened much more often with younger politicians than with “older” ones, again, whatever that's supposed to mean. We are not going to guarantee fit candidates by lining people up by how “old” they are. What kind of society are we to attempt to do that?
Tying either competence or character to age is also without statistical or even anecdotal support. Every year crime goes up at the same rate as the consumption of ice cream, and goes back down at the same rate later in the year. That correlation has no causal relationship. It’s even more obvious for ageism. Not only is there no causal effect between age and competence or character, there isn’t even a false correlation like there is between ice cream and crime. Issues with character or competence are as common among fifty year-olds as they are among seventy five year-olds. And some eighty year-olds are much more competent than some forty year-olds. Neither correlation or causation apply, yet we keep harping on age as the problem.
Martin Luther King said we should judge people by the content of their character, and others would add, by our confidence in their competency. Those are legitimate reasons to find someone else, but neither of them are inherently tied to age in any way. We must stop promoting ageism as socially acceptable. It's an easy blanket to throw over everyone in a specific class, but it’s lazy, discriminatory, and frankly, deeply disturbing in an era where we are learning to not paint people with broad brushes, or use a state of being over which they have no control, to disqualify them.
Is the candidate incompetent or lacking in character? Address that. But if you attempt to tie it to age, it will be very easy to find people older, younger, or similarly aged who are either much more qualified, or much less.
And the collateral damage in this discrimination is the message we're sending to young people - that all people eventually get “too old” to be of use, and need to be put out to pasture. Some people do indeed grow older, and some of them do that at the ripe old age of fifty. Others almost never grow older, but grow elder, wiser, and more useful, and continue to have the mental, emotional, physical and cognitive fitness of a forty year-old for their entire lives.
Discrimination is lazy. We need to stop painting with broad brushes and have the courage to define the real reason we don’t want someone to continue attempt to contribute. It’s never about age. It’s always about competence and character, at any age.
Signed,
Elder, Never Older
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/03/cover-new-concept-of-aging #:~:text=Ageism%20is%20defined%20as%20discrimination,as%20racism%20and%20gender%20bias
