The whole youth culture is bathed in positive words surrounding boldness, adventure, beauty, sharpness, clarity and speed. The negative associations of raucous, rude, lazy, untidy, broke, thoughtless may be a more true description of the life but are more often just assigned to one individual. The positive attributes would be used more correctly when attached to the individual. The second half of life is more often bathed in words associated with frailty, poor sight, bad health, forgetfulness, sadness, disease to name just a few. These words have been wrongly pasted on the entire group of over 60s. The more positive attributes of wisdom, wealth, focus, talent, knowledge, experience, thoughtfulness somehow seem to have been lost or offered second place for the less complimentary. A person who is well known, clever and made a contribution to an important area but just happens to be over 60 has to fight off the traditionally recognized verbal and written words from the more typical descriptions. An Australian artist was furious when the newspaper review of a major exhibition of her lifes work introduced her as an elderly, frail female desperately trying to make a few dollars. The catalogue description from the husband described her as an attractive, focussed highly talented Australian artist keen to share her gift with the world through display of a collection of some 500 pieces of original work. Needless to say the catalogue sold the pictures! Copyright 2006 Patricia Little |
