From: WildcatPrs@aol.com Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 10:56:53 -0400 ****************************************************************************** NEWS YOU DIDN'T SEE ON TV A commentary by Patricia Nell Warren 6/24/96 ****************************************************************************** OF 60TH BIRTHDAYS, AND TREES By Patricia Nell Warren It's strange to turn 60 in a country, where "old age" is dreadedby so many. On June 15, that benchmark birthday came to me. It seems only yesterday that I decided to stop plucking out those first silver hairs with tweezers. Now all the hairs are silver! As I ponder the big 60, what comes to my mind is...trees. In my lifetime I've planted a lot of trees -- on the ranch where I grew up, in various gardens across the country. On 6 clearcut acres in the Sierra Nevada, as I re-forested this raped land and watched a young redwood surge ten feet towards her 300-foot magnificence, I started asking myself questions about age. Isn't it strange that a middle-aged tourist will drive 3000 miles to look at a gnarly redwood tree...then go home and look in the mirror at his or her own gnarly visage, and decide to have a face-lift? Would anybody in their right mind do a face-lift on a magnificent old redwood tree? And isn't it odd that American culture wants to lead the world bravely into universal democracy, while so many of us practical tyranny on the old? Many citizens go ecstatic over settled old landscapes, venerable old houses, valuable old books, smooth old wines, but they get weird about old humans. Most media don't do covers or ads for "magnificent old people" in high-tech jeans or Speedos. A magazine needs guts to put any celebrated oldie on the cover, especially a female. Some gyms and clubs deny member- ship to old people. Many adults give teenagers a lousy example by viewing old people as ugly, scary, even funny. One evening in L.A., I overheard two young guys laughing at a "troll" tottering past on a cane. I happened to know the old man. He was a a noted civil-rights pioneer of long ago, to whom the heartless duo were indebted for some of their gay freedoms. Street kids taunt homeless old people, batter them, rob them, often set them on fire. Why the hell would anyone want to get old in America? Culturally, Americans have a Norman Rockwell picture of old age embedded in their brains, like a microchip -- of beaming oldsters banked with grandchildren and loving appreciation. Realistically, however, this is largely a lie. Many of our elderly live lonely and leanly, done out of jobs early. Few younger people ask to know their wisdom, or experience. Even some brilliant minds and brave spirits of yesteryear live threadbare lives, all but forgotten. For many, there's the dreary existence of nursing homes, and an existence that becomes less and less visible with time. Indeed, it's hard to see where many of our elders end up -- those 90-something veterans of World War I, those Rosie the Riveters with their coifs gone white. Maybe somewhere over the rainbow, there is a hidden place where they go to die, like the mythical elephant graveyards you used to hear about. But you won't find their bones scattered in plain view on the social savannahs of American today. Many younger Americans now look the other way as shriveling income and soaring medical costs rob old people of their health and homes. If Medicare goes belly up by the year 2000, as predicted the other day, the streets will be flooded with more elderly homeless. If no humane solution is found for the problem, more cities may pursue the current trend of passing ordinances that empower their police to sweep homeless old people off the streets and into mental hospitals. Indeed...it's not strange that growing numbers of unwell elders claim the right to choose that "death with dignity" called euthanasia. The media are equally inept at translating redwood into human. In the news, in movies, death as high drama is reserved for the young and youngish. They die of war, famine, suicide, drug ODs, alcoholism, AIDS, auto accidents. National indignation erupts when a single child shot during a drive-by; but when some 80-year-old woman is beaten to death in her apartment, there is seldom more than a ripple. Yes, these are challenging times to be old, as our overcrowded Planet lurches towards millennium. Bible believers aren't alone in shivery belief about end times; many cultures, including the Hopi People, teach that humanity itself goes through its old ages, that every age zeroes into cataclysm. When human needs outreach the Planet's resources, change downloads swiftly. In conditions like these, children and able-bodied adults would have the edge, while old people may perish swiftly -- or even be considered expendible. Whatever is ahead, I have questions, and no easy answers about growing old. These days I am creakier, but determined to defy the cultural pressures, and stay strong and hopeful. The life-lesson of a tree is to spend your whole lifetime growing -- to learn how to grow ever more mightily, whatever societal soil you've taken root in. To a redwood last day of her 3000 years, whether she is taken out by a big storm or a logger's chainsaw, she never stops putting out new feeder roots, new fringes of green. And when you finally cut her down, no matter how thunderously she crashes amid her ruined magnificence, she has the power to grow again from the roots. Small wonder that, in the saner younger days of humanity, trees were a symbol of wisdom, strength and beauty in our elder years. I fought to remember that, as I blew out those 60 candles. ****************************************************************************** ** Author's note: Patricia Nell Warren is author of "The Front Runner" and other bestselling books about gay life. Her publisher is Wildcat Press. For information on her books, the Wildcat web pages can be found at http://www.wildcatcom.com and http://www.gaywired.com/wildcat/wildcat.htm ****************************************************************************** ** Copyright (c) 1996 by Patricia Nell Warren. All Rights Reserved. ****************************************************************************** *