VERY often nowadays I hear people I know quite well, exclaiming they are senior citizens. It’s as if they have suddenly come to a chasm, jumped the other side, and are qualified to call themselves so.
I hear it so often, it has begun to quite amuse me, especially the way it is misused: Quite often as an excuse not to do something, or to get somebody to do something for them they give that helpless look and say, “Me senior!” I really don’t mind doing things for seniors if that senior proves he or she can’t do it by themselves: I have never heard the old folks of yester years complaining they cannot get something done, in fact when I do offer help to an eighty year old or somebody in their seventies, most of the time I am politely told, “When we need help we’ll ask you Bob!”
Not so these new seniors who have joined the club. Sixty is a sort of cutoff mark for them. “From today, I am old, infirm, and on my way to my death bed!” Who did this to them? The government of course!” To get this huge new vote bank, governments have been doling out a number of freebies to these citizens and needing to fix an age limit, fixed sixty.
But sixty is not old anymore. And so you have these young sixty year olds enjoying huge benefits, which others pay for, and which they laughingly enjoy: Fifty percent off on train travel. Likewise air travel and the list is endless. Once upon a time the average life span was around forty! Can you believe that? But today you see sprightly seventy and eighty year olds and very often ninety year olds too, walking around.
There’s an eighty year old, who jogs in the park I walk in. Which means if you live to ninety, and many do, you have enjoyed thirty years of being a senior citizen! We need to raise the senior age to seventy or even seventy five: Why, our politicians are called young at sixty!
But I can imagine the faces of all those of my friends who have been clinging to this ‘senior’ excuse. What will they do now? “Bob, because of your silly ideas we have another fifteen years before we can complain about our arthritis!” “Do you have arthritis?” “No! But it sounded nice saying it when we were senior citizens..!”
