From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 10:56:53 -0400

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NEWS YOU DIDN'T SEE ON TV

A commentary by Patricia Nell Warren                      
6/24/96

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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.

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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

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Copyright (c) 1996 by Patricia Nell Warren. All Rights Reserved. 

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