Speechless

I stole the title of this entry. It’s the name of the upcoming concert by Resonance Women’s Chorus of Boulder, the chorus I’ve been volunteering with this year. (I’ve written often about Resonance, both before and since my time with them. Try the “search” function to the right to see just how often.) This title was just too perfect to pass up. “Wordless” might have worked, but it’s not just words but speech, with all its structure and artifice, whose absence I want to talk about. I’ve learned something about this “speechless” thing listening to Resonance rehearse all year. I’ve learned that music—even, paradoxically, choral music—is about so much more than words. In fact, in an odd sense, it doesn’t have to be about words at all.

Now, I say this as someone who has always loved lyrics. Well, “loved” may not be the precise word. I’ve always been deeply attentive to lyrics, whether I love them or hate them. When I find a piece moving, I can’t help but cry as I think about the lyrics (which, by the way, makes it virtually impossible for me to sing such a piece—as my singing teacher can tell you). And I can’t seem to avoid thinking about the lyrics, so I’ve shed a lot of tears over songs. In short, I don’t take lyrics lightly.

But during this year, sitting in the room once a week and listening to Resonance practice, I have slowly embraced a different way of hearing music—of actually hearing the music. Which is to say the notes and the harmonies and the cadence and the complex interweaving of it all. And then something more, something behind or beneath all of that. When I first began to get a feeling for the songs Resonance will be performing in this concert, I was frankly a bit distressed. Would there be enough, I wondered, of the moving, lyrics-rich songs I’ve loved in earlier Resonance concerts? Would I be able to (mentally) sing along with these pieces, if some of them have no words and others have non-English words? But as I listened and became familiar with these pieces, I began, slowly, to hear the music behind the music I was hearing.

Actually, several of the pieces do have lyrics, and marvelous ones. Every time I hear “Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver, my blood pressure drops about 20 points, and I drift into a dawn-lit meadow of sound, an image of watching sunrise from a chilly mountain campsite. I love the scenes and the feelings that these lyrics evoke. And still, even in this piece, I hear something that’s new to me. Something behind the lyrics, behind even the notes. I really got this when I heard the chorus practicing it the other night, with the director, Sue Coffee, leading them in modulating the speed and the volume of different passages. The words didn’t change, the notes were the same, but the feeling of it was entirely different, moving in a new way. There is something here, I thought, that transcends the words, even the music in the structural sense.

It’s fitting that I learned this precisely as Resonance prepared this particular concert, “Speechless.” The poster reads, “125 women singing beyond words, in sonic explorations of realms perhaps not reached by language.” This description reminded me of the concept of “soundscapes,” which I’ve talked about before—and indeed, Sue has incorporated some soundscape elements into the concert (birdsong and “ambient sounds,” anyone?) It also brings to mind the multi-sensory images and complex feelings of several of the songs, which, though wrapped in words, evoke experiences that are wordless. Like the miracle of sunrise in “Morning Poem,” which I just mentioned:

Every morning

the world

is created.

Under the orange

sticks of the sun

the heaped

ashes of the night

turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches 

and the ponds appear

like black cloth

on which are painted islands

of summer lilies. 

and the unending presence of people who have passed in “Breaths” by Ysaye Barnwell of Sweet Honey in the Rock:

Those who have died have never, never left

The dead are not under the earth

They are in the rustling trees, they are in the groaning woods

They are in the crying grass, they are in the moaning rocks

Words, I know, and notes, rhythm, harmonies. And more.

And then there are the pieces that have no words at all—or no words that are understandable to most of us (imagine learning a few of those for a concert). But they still have this newly discovered (for me) something that transcends language. They have no words, but they nonetheless carry meanings—meanings as individual as the minds that hear them, as universal as the language of notes on a scale.

I’ve mentioned before the remarkable community that these women are, how much they share—stuff and caring and thoughts—with one another. As we’ve approached this concert, they’ve shared a lot of reflections about the music. One chorus member passed on a poem, fittingly called “Words,” by Dana Gaoia, which conveys something of the superfluous nature of words in the face of profound meaning. A glimpse:

The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

I’d never have imagined this speechless quality of choral music before I spent this time with Resonance, immersed in precisely this sort of music. Maybe you need to hear this concert to understand what I mean. Or maybe you don’t. Likely many people have long known this. But to me, a novice to the more profound reaches of music, the surprising ability of speechless music to speak to my soul is new.

What a gift that is.

If you want to hear for yourself (which you definitely do), Resonance will be performing on two Saturdays, April 12 and April 19, at 7:00 and on Sunday, April 13, at 2:00 at First United Methodist Church in Boulder. For more information (including information on how to get tickets), click right here. I’ll see you, perhaps speechless, there! 

To comment on this post, click on "No comments" (or "2 comments," etc.) below. Comments from "anonymous" welcome.

Buds, everywhere buds

    

                                                     

  

‘The Lived Experience of Disability’

Last time, I wrote about my gradual evolution toward a clearer understanding of disability issues. That blog focused on abelist language, just scratching the surface of what I’ve been thinking about lately in this general domain. It also mentioned a conference that offered me an opportunity to learn—and to reflect—more about this topic. The organization that sponsored this conference, the Association for Women in Psychology, has worked hard over many years to address issues of diversity. But this was the first time the conference has focused on a particular dimension of diversity, in this case, ‘The Lived Experience of Disability.’

This conference was in Columbus, Ohio. Not an ideal setting for a mid-winter conference, it seemed to me. I'd never thought much about Columbus, Ohio (except gathering from the song, "Hello Life, Goodbye Columbus" that it might be a place better left behind), and I didn't expect an exciting locale. But I did manage to learn some interesting facts about the area. For instance, Ohio played a very large role in the Civil War (Gens. Grant and Sherman were both Ohioans, as were other major generals and several members of Lincoln's cabinet), and as early as 1828, Columbus was a very early stop in the Underground Railroad. I also spotted some interesting architectural contrasts, public art, and community culture. I'll share a few photos from my pedestrian journeys while I tell you about my attitudinal journey. 

For starters, here's the street sign outside our hotel. Not a bad beginning ...

I knew almost immediately that this would be a good experience for me when I looked around the conference hotel and saw that I would be spending a few days in the company of many people who did not share my ability status. I wondered how this felt to them—to be in this company, perhaps for a change, not alone. I was also immediately aware of my own lack of facility in this situation. I wasn’t sure how to be, how to act, how to interact with these women. Some of my awkwardness stemmed from my sheer lack of experience. Some came from wanting so badly to do it ‘right’ and realizing how little I knew about what that would mean. And some was the awkwardness that comes from being confronted so directly with my privilege—with a piece of my privilege that I rarely have to look at.

This was a multi-day conference, and I went to a lot of sessions, most of them about disabilities. I won’t even try to summarize them all (You’re welcome). Instead, let me share just a few things that had particularly strong impact for me.

First, I was struck by the many parallels between ableism and ageism. In each case, the member of the ‘target’ group—people with disabilities and old people—are infantilized by those who don’t belong to the group. They’re treated as incapable of managing their lives, as constantly in need of care, as dependent on others. I so empathized with the speakers who said, basically, ‘Don’t always assume I need help. I’ll ask if I need you to do something for me.’ How many times have I had people offer, insistently, to carry my stuff for me, to open a jar, to help me with a computer, to do a million things I’m perfectly capable of doing.

Still, on reflection, I realize there are also huge differences: we are old only during one, relatively short part of our lives, whereas many people live with disabilities for much or all of their lives. People with lifelong or long-standing disabilities live with the associated stigma and with the demands of an abelist world for many years—even a lifetime. That means more years of discrimination and dismissal by that world—and it also means more years of resilience and competence despite that world. How does all that translate into the lived experience of aging as a person with a disability? I don’t know, but I’m sure it adds complicated layers that my aging doesn’t include. Also, there’s the reality that my aging entails a huge loss of privilege. I’m used to a world that worked pretty well for me—sexism and homophobia aside—and now it doesn’t. My outrage at this shift tells me something about the level of my privilege before it. And I can only wonder how this same shift is experienced by people with disabilities, for whom the world never worked so well.

A second thing I learned at this conference—also about my own privilege—is how rarely I have encountered to any great extent the ‘lived experience of disability.’ How few people with disabilities I have known, especially well. How few workshops or even single presentations about disabilities I’ve attended. How few people with disabilities enter my life in any venue—social, political, educational, cultural. Thinking about this made me realize how easy it is for us to miss these experiences—either through active avoidance or simply because our world is arranged in such a way that we don’t invite or create these interactions. This, in turn, makes me aware of my own privilege … again. Privilege has been defined as the absence of a need to think about your identity because the world is set up to work for you. White people don’t have to think about race, men don’t worry about gender, and the able-bodied world doesn’t have to think about disabilities. To do it, we have to want to, we have to think it matters. Otherwise, life colludes to protect us from dealing with it.

My third ah ha moment came in a discussion of deafness following a panel on the topic. An audience member posed a question about a hypothetical woman, an ally to the deaf community, who knew American Sign Language. What should this woman do, the questioner asked, if her partner refused to socialize with this woman's deaf friends because the partner couldn’t join in their conversations. The panelist replied that the partner might consider that s/he doesn’t have to understand everything that happens in order to be present and social. The partner might consider that this is the experience of deaf people all the time—they may pick up snippets of conversations, missing most, often without others recognizing that fact at all. And then, my favorite part, the truly eye-opening, consciousness-raising part, was when the panelist suggested that if the partner really wants or needs to understand the conversation, then the partner might hire an interpreter for her/himself.

I loved this answer—it made my privilege (and my previous lack of awareness of it) so crystal clear. Why, I asked myself, should ‘they’ always make adjustments to make me comfortable?! Why aren’t I obligated, especially if I’m entering their social circle, to make accommodations instead of expecting them to? Without her answer, I would have been left thinking that some arrangement should be made for the partner—either the partner doesn’t come or the deaf people translate for him/her. A definite ah ha moment.

I also realized, by the way, that I have done a very similar thing with a bilingual friend and her family. I avoided spending social time with them because they spoke Spanish together. They would speak English on my behalf, but that didn’t feel fair. At least I knew enough to recognize that. But why, I now ask myself, didn’t I find some other way, uncomfortable for me or not? What sort of rich experience might I have missed?

And the final story: I saw a movie that featured people with a variety of different disabilities talking about their lives and their encounters with ableism. One woman, talking about how she would like able-bodied people to relate with her, said, ‘Don’t pity me. Don’t think of me as different.’ There was something in that moment that shifted my understanding. Of course, my first response to people with disabilities is likely to be exactly an awareness of their difference—that’s how we code people, by differences. The problem arises when that differences is seen as all-encompassing, and especially when ‘different’ equals ‘wrong.’ A lot shifts for me when I consider this proposal: Disabilities are no more salient than any other difference except when they are. Using a chair is no different from any other form of difference, say, being being tall or short, except when it is. It’s about context. Sometimes, using a chair matters, and an awareness of how it matters and what that asks of me is good. But when it doesn’t matter, that particular difference recedes, is not a difference that makes a difference.

I’m reminded of a famous poem that my partner often invokes. It’s by Pat Parker, a Black, lesbian, feminist poet. The poem, called For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend, starts like this:

the first thing you do is to forget that i'm Black.

Second, you must never forget that i'm Black.

In the same spirit, the point is not that disability doesn’t matter or that we mustn't recognize its impact. It's that it doesn’t matter except when it does. That distinction may not always be easy to discern. But it opens the way for those of us who are (at least temporarily) able-bodied to get past the privilege that lets us either avoid considering disabilities or insist on seeing them as all-encompassing. And that, in turn, lets us get busy with the work we need to do.

And that’s where I am today.

The language of abelism

I’ve thought a lot about language over the years. I’m especially interested in how language shapes the way we think, how we see reality. For instance, if a place is called a ‘city,’ we expect it to be a certain size and have certain amenities that we don’t expect if it's called a ‘town.’ When we call a task ‘challenging,’ we approach it differently from when we call it ‘impossible.’ This applies to how we see people, too. Like, when we call grown males ‘men’ and grown females ‘girls,’ we’re implying that males become adults, while females remain children. How could we not think of women as weak, dependent, emotional, and incapable if we think of them as children?

Language also shapes how we see ourselves. If you hear a hostile label often enough, you can’t help but absorb the negativity of it. Get called ‘ugly’ often enough, and you’re likely to believe you’re ugly. Get called ‘clumsy’ often enough and you’re likely to avoid all the activities that might embarrass you. Some of this is simple self-fulfilling prophecy. But there’s more. The subtle, non-obvious internalization of this sort of label can eat away at your soul.

Not surprisingly, I’ve thought about this especially in terms of how language has been used to demean and dismiss me—as a woman, as a lesbian, as old. But I’ve also learned enough about it over the years to be sensitive to the impact of other forms of debasing language—the language used toward racial and ethnic groups, for instance, or toward poor people, religious minorities, people with disabilities. Most of us are learning these things on the fly, trying to keep up with changing norms for what’s viewed as respectful language. But it seems like we all have areas where our vision is fuzzy, our ear is ill tuned, where we miss the hurtful messages that our language conveys. When I do that, I’m always happy if someone helps me realize it and correct it. (OK, I’m not initially happy. I’m embarrassed, even ashamed. But on reflection, I’m happy and appreciative.)

I mention this for two reasons. First, I had one of those moments just the other day. I said something to my partner about ‘foreign students.’ As soon as the word came out of my mouth, I regretted it. I know better. The word ‘foreign,’ while totally correct as a vocabulary term, carries a boatload of extraneous meaning. We use it to mean odd, frightening, out of place, something (or someone) that makes us uncomfortable. So using it to describe international students effectively describes them as ‘other,’ like they don’t belong. That’s not at all the message I want to convey, and it really isn’t what I meant. But it is what I said. My partner often talks about the difference between intent and impact. When we’re trying to be kind and respectful, it’s important to think of impact and not just intent.

And the second, related reason I mention this issue is that I just attended a conference that gave me an opportunity to focus some thought on an area of diversity where I’ve not done much work—namely disabilities. I’ve known that our culture has a lot of work to do around disabilities, and I’ve made an effort to include this issue when I enumerate the many groups whose rights and contributions need to be honored. I’m aware of some nuances of disability-related language that matter (e.g., ‘having a disability’ vs. ‘being disabled’). But in truth, I’ve not had much exposure to this issue. I recently heard one disability activist call disability “the caboose of the diversity train”—the topic that’s added on as an afterthought, but that just doesn’t garner much attention. So this conference would be a chance for me to move the caboose forward in my own consciousness by immersing myself in several days’ exposure to disability-related discussions. And given my interest in how language shapes the world, one thing I wanted to think more about was the language of abelism.

In case this ‘diversity caboose’ term is new to you, abelist language presumes that everyone is (or should be) able-bodied and that disabilities are at best unimportant and at worst, worthy of contempt. This sort of language has become something of an issue for me in recent years because two people close to me have disabilities. One is an adult who has helped me learn and continues to teach me about this issue. The other is a young child who can do none of that. This child, especially, has sensitized me to abelist language—the language that demeans or dismisses her, knowingly or not. As I've paid more attention, I’ve come to realize how much abelist language we tend to use without thinking about it. Consider examples like these: ‘Clumsy as a one-armed paper-hanger’; ‘Dumb as a stump’; ‘What are you, deaf/blind/crippled/retarded?’ Each of these uses a term that refers to people with disabilities as a slur—‘one-armed’ means clumsy; ‘dumb’ means unable to communicate: ‘deaf/blind/crippled’ means incapable of participating effectively in life as we live it. We also casually use lots of language that simply ignores the possibility of disability (and thereby the reality of people with disabilities): ‘Everyone please stand.’ ‘Please memorize the words on the board.’ ‘Listen carefully.’ ‘Look at this!’ ‘Hold this for me.’ ‘Press here to open.’ ‘Pull tab to remove.’

These days, the most common form of this unintentionally hurtful language seems to be the word ‘lame.’ Used in everyday language, ‘lame’ means, roughly, stupid or feeble, inferior or useless, ineffectual or inept. It’s reminiscent of the recent use of the comment ‘That’s so gay!’ It’s everywhere. I recently heard a radio ad for a cellphone whose tag line was ‘I used to have a lame phone, now I have a cool phone.’ Some columnists at the New York Times use it. Now, I know that when people use ‘lame’ this way, they don’t mean to be hurtful. That’s not their intent. But when I hear it, that is the impact. I think of this child who is, in a very literal sense, lame. And I realize that her condition is being used to identify something as useless. 

It’s these very personal experiences of the hurtfulness of ableism that have raised my sensitivity to it and made me want to learn more. So, I was happy to learn that the theme of this conference was disabilities, the very topic I wanted to pursue. But just what I learned makes for a longer story than I want to tack on here, so I’ll save it for my next post.

For now, I invite you to notice—just notice—how easily those of us who are (temporarily) able-bodied slide into abelist language without thinking about its impact. For me, at least, that’s been a big enough challenge to begin.

Home on the range

Wednesday was a gorgeous day, so when I found myself with some unexpectedly free time, I decided to take a walk somewhere other than my usual out-the-front-door routes. I picked an area of open space near Boulder where the mountain views are lovely and the “open space” is genuinely open. As I walked along in the windy, sunny chill, my thoughts drifted almost immediately to how much I love Colorado.

I know that some folks think that the plains side of Colorado, the part east of the mountains, where Denver and Boulder lie, is dry and empty. And I get that. Whenever I return from traveling, especially to someplace lush like New England, I'm struck by how empty and barren and brown it is here—especially during the winter. I can easily imagine how the first "settlers," coming as they did from the heavily forested east coast, saw the plains as foreign, ugly, foreboding. But knowing this place intimately, having spent most of my life in the embrace of the front range of the Rockies, I find it alive, fascinating, singularly beautiful. Even in winter. When I'm here, especially when I'm outside, away from towns and crowds, I know the meaning of a sense of place.

For me, that feeling is evoked by really simple things. The soft gold of last year's grasses,  a spot of snow beneath a pine tree,  a lone yucca plant standing out against the snow, or the much larger yuccas with last year's pods giving a hint of what this meadow looks like when the yucca are in bloom. (For a hint, check out the picture of a yucca in full bloom that follows)

Now, in truth, this is a really bad time of year for me to try to convey the deep beauty of this land with pictures. You probably have to love the semi-arid landscape of the high plains to appreciate these photos. But if you're not persuaded that this walk and this day were marvelous, come join me some time for a slightly windy, brisk, sunny winter walk with your eyes and ears open for all there is to enjoy. Maybe it will change your mind.

And if these simple things don't do it, there are the more dramatic moments. For starters, the mountains to the west were just breath taking. The high peaks were brilliant white against the blue, blue Colorado sky. This was one of those moments when a telephoto lens (vs. a telephone lens) would have been good. You'll just have to trust me when I say that the peaks looked much higher, much larger, and much closer through my eyes than through my camera.

A telephoto would have also been fun for this next shot. This little bluebird was so blue, it looked like it was hatched in a pot of cerulean paint. Too tiny and too flighty for a very close approach, but stunning even at 30 feet or so.

And then there are these markers of the changing season: spots of snow on the hills just above Boulder’s iconic flatirons, the residue of the last storm plastered against the shady northern side of the fence posts, a plant sending tentative shoots through the dormant grass ground cover, and the red of willows whose color announces the approach of spring buds along the irrigation ditch – which has surely seen many such transitions.

And then, to top off the day,  I spotted this frog from some distance, sitting near the trail. I was trying to puzzle out how a frog—much less a black one— got in the middle of this very dry meadow when I realized that it was surrounded by cow pies. You can guess the rest. Still, too cute not to document.

The next morning, I happened by a local in-town open space park, where a small (artificial) lake provides a mirror to reflect the mountains, with morning clouds flying along the tops of the peaks. Again, too far away for a phone camera to capture, but beautiful. Trust me.

Still, I have to admit to a preference for the other pictures, the other scenes. I'm a wilderness buff at heart, and a foothills trail feels a lot more like home than a city lake, however beautiful the view.

Double-edged ageism

It is the hour of the pearl – the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.

                                                                                                        John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

I've written here more than once about my encounters with ageism. Anyone who's old enough (which I happily am) and vigilant to the assorted forms of anti-old bias in our culture can likely identify daily moments when you're reminded that your age matters, and not in a good way. So the other day, when I heard a young man, a college student, use the word "ageism," I thought at first that he was especially astute and was talking about my experience. But he wasn’t. He was talking about his. He was talking about our cultural bias against youth, especially adolescence. His comment reminded me that ageism cuts two ways, trims off both ends of our lifespan. We dismiss and diminish the lives both of youth and of old people. Only that prime-time period between about 25 and about 55 (or is it 45?) counts as actual Life. All the years before that are just preparation for the age of importance, just time spent in the wings, practicing your lines. All the years after that are just slowing down, letting go, telling tired stories, shuffling off stage.

His remark got me thinking about the connection between these two kids of ageism, the one I've written about before and the one I've ignored until now—in this blog, anyhow. I actually know both kinds of bias well—the bias against old age because I now encounter it regularly, and the one against youth because I taught about it for a few decades. (I also used to face it, though that’s so far in the dim past that I sort of dismiss it as unimportant now. Not uncommon, I think. More about that in a minute.) 

In my own "prime-time years," I was teaching at Metro, which, in my early days, was full of adult students. So my goal was to get these grown-up folks to recall their own adolescence and to balance the standard, largely negative cultural view of adolescents with a more benevolent perspective—one that recognizes what adolescents are up against and that holds a degree of empathy and a great deal of respect for kids. To get them to recall their own experience of this frightening, clunky process of trying to figure out how to do life—which is no small task, especially when you have to do it with virtually no guidelines about how to get from childhood to adulthood. 

One of my perennial rants in those days pointed to how ageist our society is in our view of teens. We joke about how much easier it would be to freeze-dry them for a decade. We roll our eyes and sneer at their overblown performances when they're with their peers. We sigh or moan when they arrive en masse at the restaurant or park or shopping mall where we're trying to have a "normal" day. We occasionally invite their participation in “our” world ... and then dismiss their ideas as naïve, disregard their questions, and trivialize their attempts to engage. I used to read my classes a piece written by an 18-year-old describing his sense of his place in the world. It said, roughly, "There is nothing I can do that couldn't be done just as well by a million other people—older people, younger people, smarter people, dumber people. There's nothing I can do that anyone cares about." That's a pretty empty place to be, a pretty invisible, ignored, diminished place. He was describing the experience of someone who has been devalued so much by others that he believes it.

So back to the college student I mentioned earlier: Once I got what he meant by “ageism,” I understood what he was talking about. I could imagine how wonderfully validating it must have felt when he attended a conference where he experienced none of this ageism. What really caught my attention, though, was that he was talking about Creating Change, the very conference where I recently encountered (and wrote here about) ageism of another sort—anti-old rather than anti-youth ageism.

That bit of irony got me thinking about how these two forms of ageism differ—or not. A few things came to mind.

Anti-young ageism	Anti-old ageism	... and my cranky comments
With time, they'll be tomorrow’s leaders	They did so much; we all stand on their shoulders	How about valuing who we are right now
There, there. You’ll understand when you're older	Here, honey. Let me do that for you.	Being patronized feels bad at any age
Minimum wage because you’re too young for a real job	Minimum wage because you’re too old for a real job	The rich get richer. Besides, everyone will say how “cute” we are in that little striped hat or bright blue vest.
Your opinions don’t count because you don’t have any experience	Your opinions don’t count because your experience is out of date	Now there's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You're too old to act that way!	You're too old to act that way!	Obviously, there is a "right" age to act "that way" ... and it's not young or old.
How would you know? You've never been there.	How would you know? You were there so long ago.	Unless you're in the prime-time years, you don't know squat.
She's great—so much older than her years.	He's great—so much younger than his years	If you're young or old, age-appropriate behavior is not worthy of approval.
I'm a better judge of what's best for you than you are.	I'm a better judge of what's best for you than you are.	No comment.
But you look so much older!	But you look so much younger!	Why would anyone say this unless being/looking older (if you're young) or younger (if you're old) would be an improvement over who you actually are.
Student discounts	Senior discounts	Nice financially, but they do not make up for the dismissal of our lives or pay off the debt of years.

I could keep going, but this is enough to point out the core of ageism that joins my experiences with this young man's. The message is pretty clear: There's a narrow span of favored years that count as genuine living. And unless you're in those privileged years, you'll be reminded regularly that you're not. Which means you are, in some fundamental way, inferior. For youth, the only way out is to grow up and join the golden people. For old folks, there is no path back to that noble status.

Now, the interesting thing about this particular form of bias is that we all—all of us, at least, who survive adolescence and live to old age—have been or will be in every single one of these groups. So it's a particularly complicated type of bias. Everyone who reaches adulthood knows on a personal level what it's like to be the target of anti-youth ageism. Yet virtually every one of us learned youth-ageism well enough that, consciously or not, we direct the same bias toward the youth who come along behind us. We may try to justify it by making them different from us, less worthy ("When I was a child, I would never have ..."). But our parents' generation said such things about us, too, and it's as ageist now as it was then. And then, even as we look back with disapproval at the younger people behind us, we also look forward with equal disapproval (or, perhaps worse, pity) at the generations ahead of us. Even though we all stood in the place of the teens, and stand—or will stand, perhaps sooner than we liked to admit—in the place of old people.

How do we do this? What sort of denial makes young and old people worthy of such misunderstanding and such poor treatment when they were and/or will be us? On one level, the answer seems simple. It's unintentional, non-conscious. And that's likely true, at least most of the time. So, now we get to make it conscious and work on changing it, right? But it's not as simple as that, it seems. We've all been so totally immersed in this generational script that we live it out without particularly thinking about it. We deny our experiences as youth because we have moved beyond that—in fact, we elevate our own worthiness by accepting the idea that the earlier years were useless, except as preparation. And from the position of the privileged years, it's easy to assume that old age is miserable because everything that seems to have value in the culture belongs to these middle, these glory years—physical beauty (by our cultural standards), productivity (ditto), a young but mature body and the freedom to use it as we see fit, economic resources (at least for some of us), and the knowledge that we are "it" in this culture. So we treat folks in the groups outside our magic circle as unworthy.

Of course, this is nonsense. Youth lead real, complex and interesting lives now. Their lives matter today, not just in the future. Constructing who they are and who they will be is not trivial work. Old people lead real, complex and interesting lives now. Whether or not they "contribute" in the narrow way we may typically evaluate contribution, they are full human beings: they love, fear, hope, give, need, share, long, sing, wonder, hurt.

Given that we all get to occupy all these positions—unless, that is, we slide off the people mover prematurely—it seems like it might prove enlightening for any of us to slip into the shoes of our young selves at 20 and our old selves at 80. From this personal perspective, we might be able to spot the many forms of ageism that we all practice every day—practices we would hate having aimed at us.

To be honest, I've never before given much thought to the connections between old-ageism and youth- ageism. But now that I have, I think I'll start my personal consciousness-raising process by regularly clarifying whose experience I'm talking about when I say "ageism." I've been using it as if it applied only to me. Doing that ignores the fact that ageism affects young people too. The man who was so delighted at the absence of anti-youth ageism at Creating Change deserves his joy over that as much as I would if I experienced an absence of old-ageism.

This also means that my earlier critiques of Creating Change as failing to address ageism need to be qualified. The conference hasn't done enough to address old-ageism. It has worked really hard—and apparently successfully—on youth-ageism. And the resultant expansiveness and energy of youth involvement is one of my favorite parts of Creating Change. I've said that before, but I missed what the delighted presence of youth said about ageism in this broader sense.

So, thanks to this man's unintended challenge, I leave this unexpected exploration of the meaning of ageism with a much enriched understanding. 

It's a nice example of the absurdity of dismissing the experience of anyone, any age.