Ashton Applewhite is on a mission to counter the ageism rampant in society's media, particularly as seen in advertising. Hearing her astute comment on a 10/10 Weekend Edition segment on National Public Radio about an insulting ageist Buick commercial, I visited Applewhite's website This Chair Rocks and viewed her blog and You Tube channel.
Applewhite's message: Every senior is not ill, depressed, woefully behind the times, ripe for Alzheimer's disease or suffering from incontinence and other embarrassing system failures. Applewhite quoted statistics that show the percentages of people experiencing illness and indignities are in the single digits. Most older people live happy, healthy and fulfilling lives, including octogenarians. So, stop making fun of seniors.
Brava to Ms. Applewhite! Hers a message worth repeating until ad agencies stop trivializing and demeaning seniors once they are bumped out of the last market survey age group and arrive at age 66. Astonishing how agencies ignore the money spent by older consumers.
I applaud Ms. Applewhite's mission, exasperated as I've been by commercials featuring "older" couples: he the silver-haired energetic type and she obviously much younger - as if an attractive senior female is too hard to find.
Aside from dispensing with the unappealing stereotypes foisted on seniors as a group, it would be even better if society did not mock the older people who do succumb to illness or suffer life's indignities.
Imagine us being okay with jokes about sick children? Utterly unthinkable. Yet jokes about the frail elderly abound, as if laughing at them lifts a shield to keep such a fate at bay. Even if only 5% of the elderly find themselves facing one kind of ill health or another, the group is still made up of human beings. Our own kind. Being isolated by society shouldn't be their final indignity.
Historic Reflection by Vincent Mancuso