Once you reach a certain age, it's like you don’t count in Ireland
Wally Funk, pictured with Jeff Bezos, is well respected. But adults in Ireland are treated with a type of demeaning kindness.
Headed for the stars, she was, from the outset. She had everything going for her, right down to the memorable boyish first name. But the important stuff was also in place. Ambition. Brain power. Hard work. Physical strength and flexibility. She completed tests faster than any of the seven men on the programme and won better results.
But when push came to take off, Wally Funk was gently told she had a problem. Yes, NASA had taken on 13 women to be trained alongside the Mercury 7 guys as potential astronauts, and it had made for great pictures, especially because Wally and her female peers were young — she was 22 at the time — good looking and well presented. But they were girls, you see, so they couldn’t be sent into space. They must understand that.
Wally didn’t understand it and didn’t like it, but this was 60 years ago, so choices for women were limited, and getting argumentative with the state didn’t tend to be productive. So she resigned herself to never going into space.
And then along came Jeff Bezos, that most unlikely of heroes, offering her the chance, at 82, to get on his space ship and blast off with him. She turned up for the photo op crisply suited and scarved, ready to serve, if a little later than she had initially wanted to.
Wally Funk is the exception, not just because she survived long enough to fulfill ambitions squashed by the misogyny of the last century, but also to provide a bright-faced determined counterpoint to the pervasive negative image of age left by the pandemic.
That image starts, inevitably, with the postage stamp photographs of aged faces looking out of obituary features: these are the ones who died and the overwhelming majority of them were in their sixties, seventies and eighties. But it doesn’t stop there. It wasn’t just the aged faces of the dead that created a dead-or-done-for instinctive prejudice against older people during the pandemic.
The archetypal picture was of a little old lady standing on her doorstep smiling gratefully at a young man who had dropped a carton of groceries halfway down the path. So sweet. So helpless. So passive. Although that wasn’t the worst. The worst was the one that was used in every second TV newscast.
Two arthritic hands, crinkly skin and drainpipe veins in full display, clasped over the crook of a walking stick. That’s how a sizable chunk of the Irish nation was repeatedly portrayed, and don’t tell me it didn’t create a particularly limiting mental picture in the public mind.
You won’t readily find a person over 70 in Ireland who loves that picture and sees it as representing them. Criminals doing the “perp walk” hold their jumpers over their faces. Most older people would love to do the equivalent over the blood bruises and the thin shiny skin that comes with the territory. Nobody says to an person using a stick or Zimmer frame that it really goes with their jacket.
The ultimate compliment is “you don’t look your age”. Not much of that around, over the past 18 months. Rather, the reverse. A generation was epitomized by diminution, summed up by the worst that can happen. The over seventies were reduced, in one fell swoop, to a small series of godawful images.
Now, here’s the reality. Those over-70s include retired professors, architects, doctors, CEOs and CFOs who are active, contributory, compus mentis and baffled to see themselves summed up by those demeaning images in mainstream media.
Even if you consider the nursing home population, which is necessarily a less able cohort than those living at home, it’s doubtful if the arthritic hands/walking stick picture is representative of them or desired by them.
It’s just easy and obvious. Just as it was easy and obvious, sixty years ago, for NASA to decide that because Wally Funk was a girl, she couldn’t hope to go into space.
Easy and obvious stereotyping is still acceptable in relation to older people and none of the organisations devoted to their interest seem to be willing to fight it. Organisations with gender specific remits, like those working for women’s interests, likewise. Once you’re over a certain age, you don’t count.
The other thing is that, since the pandemic began, older people have been framed as mothers or grandmothers. (Currently, that takes the form of a radio ad about “Mum” falling up the stairs and being stuck there all night until her carer arrived. This to flog an electronic contact device.)
Child-free singletons over seventy might as well not exist. They don’t appear, any more than the thousands of lucid, expert over-seventies appear. And the considerable cohort of older people who normally work outside the house disappeared, too.
Older people disappeared during the pandemic except as coccooners, grateful recipients, relatives, vulnerabilities and victims. Never has any generation suffered such extinction, exacerbated by the fact that many of them were not frenetically active on social media.
Never has any generation been (wrongly) assumed to have so little agency. Nor, as the pandemic dies down, do we see evidence of any reversal. No. If you’re over sixty five, you are assumed to be not just past it, but past everything. Most workplaces insist on retirement in mid sixties, although the Guards are uniquely ageist in wanting everybody gone by 60, whether they’re walking a beat or driving a desk.
The moral is: setting up and owning your own business can extend your basic human right to work, if you want to, by three decades.
Of course kindness is available, but kindness can be a questionable currency. Kindness and coercion always march together in lockstep. Kindness and control, ditto. An offer of help, accepted, often morphs into that slithery demeaning question beginning “Should you?”
Should you be driving or wearing heels? Should you be out on your own? Funny, that. Funny how Irish is that intrusive “compassion.” Nobody asks Joe Biden those questions. Or the Pope. Or Dr Fauci. Or even Donald Trump. Like them or loathe them, they are regarded as competent adults.
Not to say powerfully influential, interesting, visible adults. Wally Funk is the latest older American who just doesn’t provoke demeaning kindness.
It seems to be only Ireland that wants to cotton-wool its older people, in the process erasing their presence. We know, on a weekly basis, what the publicans, the restauranteurs, the retailers think.
Their spokespeople are familiar faces and voices constantly contributing to the public discourse and doing no end of good for our view of their members. No such presence or relevance has been accorded to older adults.
Close to 650,000 people in this country are over sixty five years of age. Just under 14% of the total population. As many as one in four of the adults. Most of them ushered by forced retirement into inactivity and then ushered by the pandemic into invisibility or caricature.
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