Is Age The New Apartheid?

by Ian R Thorpe

Remember when Shake Rattle and Roll meant something more than just getting out of bed?

Religion is the new witchcraft so if we are talking in terms of old prejudices being recycled with different labels what is coming down the road to repace racial segregation? Fortunately the civilized nations of the world said goodbye to institutionalised racism many years ago. Black people and White now ride on the same bus and even sit side by side, everywhere from Jackson, Mississippi to Johannesburg, S.A. Not many middle class people would be seen riding buses these days of course, public transport is reserved for the new underclass, the poor and the old. but the principle is established: segregation of the of people by colour, religion, class or wealth is morally and legally wrong.

No doubt in time practice will catch up with principle but what passes for civilization in the 21st century thrives on an us and them society. A famous British TV drama of the 1960s explored this theme. If There Werent Any Blacks You Would Have To Invent Them (watch on You Tube), it showed how racism is more to do with the class system than ethnicity. So now that the poorest or most insecure white citizens cannot openly look down on their black neighbours, how do the lower levels of society give themselves status? White trash? Pikeys? Low information voters? There are many ways; house snobbery is a biggie, do you have a mortgage, rent from a private landlord or worst, a public service housing agency. Home buyers, or home owners as they like to style themselves although all they really own is the obligation to pay off a debt, even in the meanest of mortgaged homes quite glibly regard themselves as superior to renters. And those who live in municipally owned property are the lowest of the low. So there is one Apartheid. The job snob is another segregationist. People who work in financial services for example find it easy to be condescending about trades such as plumber, electrician, car mechanic, bricklayer etc. although there is little doubt which group would be most quickly missed should they be removed from society. The most worrying manifestation of the new Apartheid though is the marginalisation of old people. This started out with wrinklies being derided as demented husks who could do nothing but suck their toothless gums and reminisce about the war, but more and more I hear people of my age group complaining of feeling marginalised. We know nothing, our
Joanna Lumley (67) Dried up old husk or shamsh?

skills are obsolete, we are regarded as if we speak a foreign language (some of us actually

do, because in our day you could not earn a pass in French for simply turning up, you had to be able to say ce vin est merde Msieur.) and our status in the modern world is similar to that of a boil on the arse. There is just no place for the middle aged in the

twenty first century. Everything now is organised, managed. If it can be measured it can be managed goes the slogan of big governments favourite Management Consultancy, missing the point that clerks are the traditional counters and measurers of thing, the art of managing lies in being able to control that which cannot be measured. In addition to the obsession with counting and measuring we are in the grip of a notion that we must not embark upon any venture without having been properly trained. Ask yourself did Edison receive training before he made the first incandescent light? Was Marconi trained in wireless technologies before he sent the first radio message. Did Alexander Graham Bell have to earn a degree in telecommunications before he invented telephones? As the Greek philosopher Aristotle put it, What we have to do we learn by doing.

All in all, you're just another brick in the wall

Where did my mother look for advice when I came along? My Grandmas. Yet now the idea of grandparents being involved in a childs upbringing in any capacity other than occasional money provider is sneered at by our New Unhappy Lords, the academic elite and the caste of experts their dominance of education has spawned.. New parents are given parenting classes, in which they are taught by childless but very sincere people with qualifications in childcare that all babies are the same and will respond in the same way to things. Old people have no idea what they are talking about we are told and yet it seems to me, and my memory is not quite fuddled yet, that there were far less problem kids when I was at school.

Ah school, where the only history taught is that the past is a foreign country they do things differently there, so we can safely ignore anything that happened more than two days before we were born. So differently did they do things in the past, so completely abandoned by the state were incompetent and irresponsible, uneducated young mums and dads of the working class that the role of parents has now been taken over almost completely by agents of the caring, sharing, politically correct Nanny State. If you can't afford a properly qualified carer for your children you are bad parents. Or so it would seem if we read left wing newspapers and magazines or listen to 'experts'. I remember getting my daughter in trouble once by showing her how to use an encyclopedia to find information for a project. Her submission was rejected with the comment your course has not covered this information yet. To put it bluntly, the teacher was saying pupils were only allowed to know what the system tells them. Now we are getting to the really Machiavellian aspects of the new Apartheid. Teenagers are coached to such an extent in doing what the system says they should that they lose interest and start getting their thrills from taking an interest in things a reponsible parent would rather they stayed away from. Nanny State does not care when they get pregnant, catch embarrassing diseases, become addicted or land in jail. Dysfunctional people generate lots of work for the bureaucracy. In the eighteenth century Lord Chesterfield said nothing in life sets up a young man so well as having an older mistress. I wonder what he would have made of the current fad of daisy chaining, in which children (they would hate me calling them that) leave school at the end of the day and have sex with as many partners as

possible before they have to go home to watch the soaps. And yet parents are excluded from sex education too. And if anyone objects to the way promiscuity, homosexuality and lesbianism are promoted they are going to be in a lot of trouble. Children have even been excluded from some schools for having devout Christian parents. Strangely there is never a problem in exempting Muslims. People dont have to be Muslims or even Christians to believe the way sex is handled in schools is not just wrong but damaging. More than a few of us even among the non religious would teach children that relationships are not simply a numbers game and their sex organs are not toys. But of course, numbers can be measured, love cannot. And things like dignity and self respect, discipline, well nobody has any use for those now, they belong to a generation that will soon be dead. Or will they? While the young are being steered towards a lifestyle of total dependency on the government and it's hierarchy of public servants, what is happening to the old, the people who worked, saved and planned for their later years, who took responsibility for themselves? In 2011, under the headline 'Life Expectancy Rises By 44 Days In One Year' a newspaper report highlighted one of the many problems medical science has created. As technology destroys jobs and medicine finds cures for more diseases and ways to increase the birthrate, we are also extending the period of old age without actually extending by a matching amount the productive life of people. This is placing an ever

increasing burden on welfare budgets and health services. Consider the tragic irony of science for a moment. Research frenetically seeks ways to keep us alive longer. But does living loner make us happier or is it just a numbers game the coneheads are playing for the benefit of their own egos; does longevity create more social problems for a civilisation already in trouble? Life expectancy is now accelerating so rapidly experts are talking about humans reaching 'escape velocity', with our life expectancy rising by more than a day for every day we live. A baby born this year will, on average, live for more than 90 years and nine months according to a news study published last year. All that is in spite of all those warnings from 'experts' that alcohol, junk food, lack of exercise, lack of vaccines, legal drugs, illegal drugs (anything but prescription drugs,) are all taking years off our lives. As a result of us living longer more than 11 million people alive today (or 17.5% of the population) can look forward to living to be more than 100 years old. Men, who have traditionally lagged behind women in life expectancy, largely because of war, last year saw their longevity increase faster than women by 46 days on average. The figures published by the Department for Work and Pensions suggest that one in four people now aged under 16 will live beyond age 100. Just 30 years ago more than a quarter of boys were expected to die before their 65th birthday. Ministers said that the rapid rise in longevity had enormous implications for public policy in a range of areas from health to transport, with taxpayers facing a much bigger bill for looking after an ageing population. The news will also fuel the debate about raising the default retirement age. Millions of workers who will only have the state pension to rely on after they stop working are already scheduled to see their retirement pushed back to age 66 by 2020 and 68 in 2046. Todays figures, calculated from data produced by the Office
Smoking takes years off your life!

for National Statistics, give greater impetus to a government consultation, announced in last months Budget, to link the state pension age to longevity. This could result in the pension age rising to 70 by the mid century. There is a risk that by focusing on longevity to the exclusion of data which showed that many people, while living longer were not enjoying a good enough health in old age to consider staying at work. On top of this a significant number of people staying in employment for an extra five years would put more pressure on an already squeezed job market. With new technology replacing jobs and the export of factory work to low labour cost nations in the developing world the future for those seeking employment looks increasingly bleak. Steve Webb, the pensions minister, said the astonishing figures were too stark to ignore. What is striking is that while we all know people are living longer, we havent grasped how fast it is going. The speed of change is astonishing. There are big issues for us as a society in all sorts of policy areas, such as social care, employment and
Old, poor and isolated

pensions, but also in terms of our

attitudes to older people. Absolutely correct. Increases in life expectancy without corresponding increases in the productive life of people or the creation of a society that can accommodate economically and socially a high proportion of elderly has led to more old people ending their days in poverty and isolation. As well as the state pension, Mr Webb warned that employees with private pensions should plan to save more for their retirement. This year, 10,000 people will celebrate their 100th birthday. By 2026, that figure is due to rise to 500,000. The point Mr. Webb misses is that in a global economy based on perpetual growth the necessary built in inflation of prices negates much of the value of savings among

people who survive well beyond the end of their working life. Neil Duncan-Jordan, of the National Pensioners Convention, said: Living longer does not equate to being able to dig a road for longer, or even to being willing and able to do a job like teaching into your late sixties. The Government keeps pushing these figures that we are living longer as a means of trying to force us to work for longer but they need to move on from this obsession with longevity and view the issue in a less black and white way. Michelle Mitchell, of Age UK, said: Average life expectancy figures hide the fact that in many places, predominantly poorer areas, life expectancy is much lower and more people need to go into residential care. Before the Government further looks to raise the state pension age it must first tackle health inequalities to ensure that those who have had harder lives do not again lose out through a shorter retirement.
Life in a care home

Clearly there are not easy answers to this. Fixing one problem seems to create several new ones. But wasn't that always the failing of scientists (even social scientists) and politicians, they just never think about long term consequences. And thus as old and young are forced to compete for an increasingly large slice of an ever smaller cake the gap between old and young gets wider. Not so long ago we looked forward to joining the adult world; older people had more fun, they told better stories, we learned from them how to think for ourselves. In order for the state to continue its march into every aspect of our private lives we must willingly become a compliant society only thinking what we are told, never questioning the state. Future generations of children will be taught how to play and how to love in the uniform way approved by the appropriate National Government Organisation, they will be educated to want to know only what they need to know, disillusioned with experience before they have had any worthwhile experiences on which to base

judgements and most of all they will be taught anybody who might give them the idea that there is a great big wonderful world beyond the boundaries of their narrow lives is an enemy. Brainwash people with the idea that they have done everything worth doing by the time they are sixteen and it becomes easy to tell them it is time to die at sixty . But to do that it is necessary to separate the young from the old who have stories to tell, experiences to recount, who have lived. And that is how the apartheid of age will be used to achieve social engineering goals.

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