Age campaign exposes narrow-minded thinking
NOBODY knows for sure what effect Liberal Party state director Sam McQuestin’s ageist attack on independent candidate Doug Chipman had on the outcome of the Pembroke by-election.
But McQuestin’s tactics certainly did not help Liberal candidate James Walker.
The ageist slur was widely regarded as a punch below the belt.
McQuestin’s suggestion that Chipman, 71, was too old for the Legislative Council exposed a debilitating flaw in the way some think about age.
This type of thinking robs many talented, capable people of opportunities and helps condemn our community to mediocrity and underachievement.
I have met 71-year-olds who could run rings around many 30-year-olds in terms of mental acuity, concentration, determination and even physical prowess.
I have met 34-year-olds with more worldly experience and wisdom than some 80year-olds.
I have met 51-year-olds who could beat the daylights out of punchy 22-year-old punks.
I have met 39-year-olds who could run faster, further — and faster for further — than some 23-year-olds.
I have met 21-year-olds with vastly more leadership qualities than 63-year-olds, and 42year-olds who could not lead a horse to water, let alone get it to drink.
I have met loving teen mums with better parenting skills than 30-year-old mothers and 49-year-old fathers with more paternal nous than disinterested 28-year-old dads.
However, there is a tendency in our communities to judge and stereotype people by age.
McQuestin’s ageist slight against Chipman included a photoshopped image posted on his party’s Facebook and Twitter accounts that included slippers, golf clubs, a fishing rod and a Perry Como album.
This ridicule was followed up by the taunt that Chipman lived a “lifestyle village” existence.
Was this to suggest those living in lifestyle villages should be excluded from the political sphere, to be cut loose from the democratic process and told to sit quietly in the corner? What rot. There are some living in such villages who are far more capable, worldly, experienced and intelligent than any of those currently sitting in either house of State Parliament.
No doubt there was an element of humour at play, especially with the image of the slippers and the Perry Como album.
But, as is often the case with humour, there is a sharper edge if you look, or listen, more deeply.
Last week I put a few hours aside for the songs of Perry Como. I knew the name of the American singer, who died in 2001, but had not really listened to his music. His is a magical voice. His song arrangements have dated and jar with con- temporary production tastes, but the heart and humanity of his tunes still shine brightly.
I suspect some of his songs, given a hip-hop beat and a few expletives, could woo the youngest mind.
Take Como’s global hit, It’s Impossible, for example.
Written by Mexican songwriter Armando Manzanero, it was recorded in Spanish as Somos Novios in 1968. This version is hauntingly beautiful. Take a listen to it being sung by Andrea Bocelli and Christina Aguilera on stage in Tuscany in 2008.
The lyric was rewritten in English by Sid Wayne in 1970 and recorded by Como in the same year. This English version was also later recorded by Elvis Presley, Shirley Bassey and others.
The heartfelt yearning of unrequited love in this song is as passionate and relevant today as it was 50 years ago. And therein lies the rub. It is often only with the experience of a life lived or a well-written old song that we learn to look beyond our own generation to see that the most significant of our hopes, dreams, achievements and disappointments have been experienced before.
These experiences are clothed in the garb of our own generation and, in blind egocentricity, we perceive them as new — as ours alone, exclusive to our own cohort.
Age-old human experiences are superficially adorned with each generation’s fashions and motifs and so appear new and unprecedented. But they are not. Being able to recognise that each generation faces substantially the same challenges, hopes, desires and aspirations is fundamental to resolving the issues we face today.
We need political representatives, workplace bosses and community leaders who are spread across the generations.
We need to harness these different perspectives because this will allow us to more easily recognise underlying realities of shared human experience so as to make fairer, wiser and, importantly, more enduring decisions and laws.
This applies to everything from issues of justice, crime, punishment, equality, health services and land use to housing, transport, finance and education.
To dismiss someone as too old or too young, and to ridicule a generation’s motifs, exposes narrow-minded thinking that should be kept as far from the legislative decisionmaking process as possible.
To dismiss someone as too old or too young … exposes narrowminded thinking that should be kept as far from the legislative decision-making process as possible