Category Archives: Current Issues

How to Defeat Aging

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This is day 4 of the post a day challenge. I am basing this post on a prompt  on the Nano Poblano site. Tell everyone how you have defeated aging.

I have to say that I have not defeated aging and I do not want to. What I would like to defeat is Ageism.

All this anti-aging talk is because people have a real prejudice and fear about older people and getting older. And the current definition of older is pretty young. This is pathetic and sad. We are all going to get old. You may be able to delude yourself and invest in all manner of plastic surgery and end up looking like Jim Carey in The Mask with The Mask on.

I am not saying you can’t use moisturizer, some makeup or color your hair and try to stay in shape and healthy. I am talking about this exaggerated reaction to the appearance of aging where we are all trying to look like we are in our 30s or 40s when we are in our 50s and 60s.

I am not afraid of aging and do not desire to defeat it. Aging to me is not a negative thing. It is part of life and very natural. Of course I hope to remain healthy and with an intact mind but none of us knows what the future holds. I refuse to live in fear.

I hate the way old people are devalued by many in our society. It is such a mistake and a loss to everyone when this great resource is neglected. It is a valuable thing to have the older generations interacting with the younger ones.

Children benefit so much from relationships with grandparents. The elders are the keepers of our history and culture. We can learn a lot from listening to their life stories and hearing about their experiences and struggles.

People should not be marginalized and shunned because they are old. This is such a pernicious trend in our culture. It is like a bad science fiction or a dystopian  film. The old go off to some disintegration machine because our youth obsessed culture can’t bear to look at them any more.

All the negativity about aging is dispiriting and discouraging. I believe that it can actually make people feel depressed about themselves and adopt a hopeless attitude about their lives. It certainly is not empowering is it?

It is really discouraging to me to hear older people denigrating themselves on top of it by making stereotyping statements or ageist remarks. It is like they have been so saturated with this prejudice that it has become part of them. Almost a kind of self-hatred or a way of ingratiating themselves with biased younger people.

It is pretty difficult to combat this prejudice because it is so ingrained. We have all internalized it to some degree. But that does not mean it is not worth it to fight to change this negative image of age.

Many older people are continuing to live fulfilling lives in spite of what is expected of them or not expected. They go on enjoying pursuits, being creative and engaged with life. They are usually not noticed by the mainstream.

There are many organizations and websites that are working to combat all the negative spin about ageing. Some are the National Center for Creative Ageing or NCCA, Encore, AARP, Engage and Senior Planet.

I hope we can turn the tide against ageism because it will benefit all of us. It is a human rights issue. No one has the right to put limits on the lives of others on the basis of gender, race, religion or age.

I challenge you to promote tolerance and become aware of ageist speech and stereotypes. See if you can catch yourself before you continue to spread these negative attitudes in your families and to your children. Do you have any older friends or family members in your life? Have you believed a stereotype about an older person?

 

|Nano Poblano| among other things 🙂

 

 

 

 

Statement by RN’s at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital as provided to National Nurses United | National Nurses United

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My thoughts about Nurses:

Nurses have always been on the frontlines of healthcare. They do the heavy lifting when it comes to patient care often with their own health at risk. They worry about exposure to infections and that they might carry something home to their families. Nurses deserve all the support we can give them along with the best training and the proper supplies and equipment to do their jobs safely for our sakes and theirs.

Link to Statement on National Nurses United blog: Statement by RN’s at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital as provided to National Nurses United | National Nurses United.

Women and the Trolls

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As one who lived during  the beginning of the women’s liberation movement and civil rights movement, I have been complacent in thinking,  ” well that’s done.” Thinking that these changes were made permanent and all is right in the world.

Like with our American Bill of Rights, I now realize we must be ready to fight these battles over and over.

I have thought younger women who minimize the contributions of the feminist movement have been naïve and ignorant in their comprehension of what actually happened back then. That much of the freedom and opportunities that women enjoy today can be attributed to that time. As women’s right to vote can be credited to the efforts of the suffragettes.

We need to be aware of and appreciate our own history.

In recent years, I have become more and more aware that the enemies of women’s freedom were not truly vanquished but retreated for a time to their dens or in some places never retreated at all.

Smoke has been seen rising from Mount Doom. The forces of evil are awake in the world.

When I read their poisonous rantings and comments degrading women for daring to speak out and have an opinion or hear about the horrid oppression of women and girls in other places in the world I am sickened.

I realize that I can not be complacent. The creature is still out there lurking and leaving a slimy trail.

"Trolls" Photo by Tristan Schmurr

“Trolls” Photo by Tristan Schmurr

I was inspired to write this post in response to an article in the New Yorker about Mary Beard, entitled “The Troll Slayer.” And because I have become aware more and more of all the misogyny and ageism in the world.

Aging with Attitude

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Be yourself-not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be.-Thoreau

I have always been a rebel at heart. You know, “marched to the beat of a different drummer.” Don’t put me in a box and tell me what to do and when. Don’t tell me I have to disappear at a certain age and be content with puttering about and going on bus tours to Las Vegas with the Senior Center. Unless that is what I really like to do. Which I don’t. So I love hearing about older people who refuse to be boxed in by society’s limited expectations of them and go on pursuing their passions with a passion.

 I follow a few great blogs and websites like EngAge and National Center for Creative Aging and recently a newsletter called Senior Planet. In my latest newsletter from them was a great video post about older people who have decided to go on living as fully as they can and the way they want to, called “  63 Minutes of Aging with Attitude.” I love it!

I don’t mean to imply that we have to prove anything to anyone else. Just to give ourselves permission to follow whatever path we have chosen.

Message To The Stars

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We all need stories that ignite our imaginations and provide inspiration for our lives and dreams.The story of the Voyager Mission  has been an inspiration for me. There were two Voyager spacecraft launched in the late 1970s. I was first married around that time but I did not become aware of Voyager until the Fall of 2009 when I was a student in a teaching credential program. Learning about Voyager really captured my imagination. I created a lesson for my students which included some of the great photos from the NASA website. I hoped it would inspire them as well and engage their interest in space exploration and science.

The Voyagers were designed to perform studies of Jupiter, Saturn, Saturn’s rings and the larger moons of those two planets. Later the mission was expanded to include Uranus, Neptune and a total of 48 moons of the four planets. Voyager sent back many beautiful images of these planets and moons. The voyagers made several discoveries including 3 new moons of Jupiter, 11 new moons of Uranus and five of Neptune. The Great Red Spot of Jupiter could be seen through earth telescopes but Voyager found out it was actually a storm moving counterclockwise across the planet. One of Jupiter’s moons, Io, was shown to have nine erupting volcanoes. These were the first active volcanoes seen anywhere else in the solar system. One of Saturn’s moons, Titan, has an atmospheric chemistry that may be like Earth’s before life evolved. On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 took the final pictures of the mission 3.7 billion miles away from us. Voyager turned back toward earth and captured an image that Carl Sagan called ” a pale blue dot.”  More information about the mission can been found on the Fact Sheet.

Placed on each spacecraft is The Golden Record  which contains our message to any extraterrestrial intelligent life that may discover our spacecraft in the future. Each record has encoded on it images from earth, information on anatomy, DNA, spoken greetings in 55 different languages, music and natural sounds including a human heartbeat, animals, birds, ocean and weather. You can listen to these sounds and see some of the photos on the NASA website.

Written on the cover of the record are instructions for accessing the information and images, spoken messages, music and sounds ; a pulsar map showing the location of our solar system; a drawing of the hydrogen atom, and a kind of radioactive clock that would allow extraterrestrials to determine when the spacecraft was launched.

Recently the Voyagers have entered interstellar space. They will continue on their journey through the Milky Way. The last instrument on the spacecraft is expected to stop working in 2025.

The Voyager Mission was an inspiration for part of the first Star Trek movie in 1979 which is about the Enterprise finding an alien spacecraft that calls itself V’ Ger. The crew discovers that is was originally an earth probe called Voyager 6 that was redesigned by an alien machine race and sent back to find its creator.

Maybe someday our descendants will receive a return message.