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By Ginny NiCarthy             

“You’re not old,” I was told, not for the first time, by a friend in his 50s.  I had just begun to explain how a situation looked from my perspective as an old person, when he protested my use of the dirty word “old.”  From the near-panicked look on his face, you’d have thought I’d begun to describe a sexually transmitted disease at a sedate dinner party.  To many 50-year-olds the very word “old” may, indeed, seem as unnerving as “gonorrhea.”  But avoiding the word will not enable us to deny our way out of the last stages of life.  Even a tummy tuck, hair graft or a dose of Viagra won’t enable us to jog through our 70s and 80s without becoming old on the way.             

Once you hit 60, some people, including age mates, may refer to you as an “elder,” a term of respect that assumes you’ve been acquiring wisdom, rather than, year after year, stubbornly practicing mistakes, as some of us do.  “Older” inexplicably implies you are not really old yet, and is meant to blur the naked truth of the stage of life you have reached.  But a glance at a basic grammar book will tell you the suffix “-er,” a comparative adjective, means “more so,” not less so.  So why do “tall-er,” “fat-ter,” “young-er” and “smart-er” designate more than the root word without its suffix, while “old-er” is meant to imply you are less old?  If the question confuses you, that probably means your head is on straight. 

If, at 62, instead of using the euphemism senior, you bluntly ask for an “old person’s” discount at a movie theater, the clerk may greet the request with a puzzled frown or nervous giggle.  A recent professional publication referred to it’s theme as the “autumn of life,” meaning of course, the life of the old.  Okay, our arches and jowls do tend to fall, along with the autumn leaves and some of us are more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of aging bodies and minds.  But, like stalwart oaks, many of us remain sturdy or at least resilient, even in the “winter of life.”When will we begin to recognize old age as a stage of life that needn’t be an embarrassment?  When will we view it as neither completely good nor bad, but a mix of delights, losses and complex challenges?  

When will we recognize that to lose our clear sight, short-term memory and even the capacity to walk unaided is not a matter for shame or secrecy?  That those losses are not something – like death in this culture – to be whispered about or referred to only in euphemistic language?  Sure, anxieties, aches, pains and new losses make their appearances.  But we might also cheerfully bid farewell to worries about our children, about what the neighbors think or success in our careers.  That can clear the decks, so we can do as we please for a few years. 

In recent decades many oppressed groups have burst out of socially imposed closets.  We can join those who have re-claimed descriptors such as “queer,” “Black,” or “African American.”  It’s time to stop fooling around with words meant to deny the existence of the last phases of life.  It’s time to boldly re-claim the solid, reality-based status implied in that venerable word: “old.”  

Ginny NiCarthy is a political activist, writer and Seattle psychotherapist (www.ginnynicarthy.org) with a special interest in helping family members in midlife communicate effectively with parents who are old or frail. Ginny NiCarthy identifies as an old woman who hopes to continue learning, contributing to society and having a whale of a good time for quite a few more years.   

Fiction 

By Shama George

When the phone rang with an unusual shrill, Susie woke up with a startle. She was not fond of waking up like this, and say the first ‘hello’ in a delirium. The rest of the morning would make her grouchy and thirsty for coffee, cup after cup.

Those mornings, Tommy stayed away from his wife, pretending to be minding his own business, reading the comic page of an old newspaper, and peeping at her once every two minutes from the family room sofa. He wouldn’t want to bring up his argument against leaving the phone ringer on at night. Susie would bounce at him, hollering, and reminding him of their daughter, Rachel, who might want to call them anytime of the day or night from India.

“What if she wants to talk to us? What if she has a problem?” Susie would argue. “What kind of problem can she have in the middle of the night?” He would look appalled.

“You are forgetting our midnight is her afternoon! Remember the last time she called? It was yesterday. She was having problems with the lab attendant, who was staring at her the whole time she was working there!”

“Ya, I remember that. But what could we possibly tell her? What did you tell her? Just ignore the stupid, open-mouthed, son-of-a-scoundrel? Hasn’t he seen a young woman before in the lab?”

“Oh, some of those Indian men! They would stare at anything wrapped with a piece of female clothing! I had to go through some of that too in the nursing school, where most of the employees were men.”

“Ya, ya, I know. Didn’t you have a crush on one of those nursing school men?” “Who told you that?”

By boona cheema

“Own country? Of what feather is that bird? And tell me, good people, where does one find it? The place that one is born in, that soil which has nurtured us. If that is not our country, can an abode of a few days hope to be it? And then, who knows, we would be pushed out of there and told to find a new home, a new country. I am at the end of my life. One last flutter and therell be no more quarreling about countries. And then, all this uprooting and resettling doesn’t even amuse anymore.” Ismat Chugati, Roots

In the last 50 years, some 100 new nations have emerged, each creating their own refugees. Mass migrations have occurred across borders. Hunger, death, rape, murder, theft, loss of family and home have become the visible horrors of this mass migration. Especially for women, this has become an almost impossible situation. Usually as non-actors of civil strife, without self-defense, their human rights have been violated by governments, and at the hands of private armies, and by fathers, sons, and brothers of their villages and towns.

As a person whose spirit connection to the world comes out of a faith-based tradition, the spirit and human rights connection for me is deeply rooted in the faith of my birth and my early exposure to the great writings in the Sikh holy book, The Guru Granth Sahib. It is important for me to share some of the tenets of this great religion and its unusual stand on the role of women and their rights in the early 16th century.

Rejecting the idea of female inequality, Guru Nanak wrote, “Man is nourished in the womb and born from a woman. - Friendship is made with a woman and civilization originates from a woman.” Guru Nanak also forbade the practice of widow immolation and encouraged widows to remarry, otherwise unheard of in those days. He was also gravely concerned with the practice of female infanticide. And the holy book forbids any Sikh to associate with anyone who has killed a girl child. In Sikh culture, women are regarded as equal and are not prevented from fulfilling their potential through education, religion, or profession.

On human rights, the other tenet is, “The sign of a good man is that he always seeks the welfare of others.” This welfare of others is further translated into action throughout the cornerstones of the religion, the concept of seva. The early Sikh theologian Bhai Gurdas writes in the holy book, “Service of one’s fellow is a sign of divine worship.

“Women’s steps to spirituality, even in Sikhism, comes from the same patriarchal groups and institutions that give them their place in society, politics, arts, and the workplace, and this spirituality is developed alongside the subjugation and the invalidation. Yet in times of war, this spirituality seems to become independent, and the spirit of women begins to be at the center of renewal. What is of deep concern here is that, politically, women only play a peripheral role. But spiritually, they bring life back after destruction, playing a central role in the community.

In the oration of the holy scriptures they found life affirmation, they made us younger girls listen to the writings and then they would give us their feminist version of the scriptures, knowing well enough that if and when the killings stopped, they would again be relegated to second place in society, religion, and culture. But for now in the freedom of torture, they were the spirit of hope and future, and they would lead the new nation to a different covenant on women.

Growing up in a family that was uprooted during the partition in India, and at a time when each woman feared for her personal safety, women were attacked, abducted, and forced to convert. During this time, it seems that women depended on their faith, they feminized the Sikh holy scriptures upon which the women in my family seemed to pin all hope. Spiritual women believed that in their religion women were regarded as equal, and somehow they would escape the horrors of the partition. While this did not come true, their spirit stood strong and the message to fight and change India remained in their consciousness. The Constitution of the newly formed India shows this to be true.

I grew up around stories of the great strength of these women and their spirit which added to the new country. Often I have also been witness to the loss of hope and spirit that comes with violations of human rights inflicted by not only strangers, not just men in uniform, but neighbors and friends turned enemy overnight. This betrayal deeply wounded the spirit of women, and yet it is this very same woman spirit that healed the wounds and rebuilt the community.

During the Vietnam war, I participated with Vietnamese nuns in the early years of Thich Nhat Hanh’s anti-war movement in Vietnam before it spread to the United States. I often felt that when the women spoke about war and peace that they got to the renewal and rebuilding aspects to peace making much faster. Once again, I felt that women’s spirit moves towards healing and recovery much faster.

In the United States, I have lived and worked with street homeless women for the last 28 years. The undeclared war in our streets is extremely brutal to women, especially homeless women who suffer from similar human rights violations as do women in areas of conflict. Rape and beatings go hand in hand with urban homelessness. Women living in the streets of America often live lives similar to the refugees from a war or other conflict, much of their experience goes unreported, and these human rights violations seem to have no place in the discussion on human rights in this country. But it is their spirit that, while dealing with survival issues, they are also in the forefront of the homeless civil rights movement. I have met some women of great spirit who have overcome and repeated violations of their bodies, mind, and spirit, and have rebuilt their lives and helped politicize this issue in their communities.

In 1947, I was two years old. For the next five years, every member of our family was uprooted and then had to resettle. It was during the stories of that time and the readings of the holy book as a community rededicating itself to the core values and principles of our faith that I formed my earliest ideas about spirit and its connection to the universe. And in my youthful universe, I knew that great harm had been done to women. It was in the women circles that stories were shared about aunts and nieces and sisters and grandmothers, the losses of land and jewels and home, and then more in a whisper, the rapes and murders and kidnappings. I remember how much I wanted to change the world and make it without violence against women, and there my spirit moved to action and service.

It pains me much that in the 50th year of the signing of the human rights declaration the situation is not much better. What surprises me most is the silence of the great faiths and religions of the world on the issues of displaced and homeless women, the violations of their basic human rights, and the continued spiritual invalidation of women by the patriarchs of the church, synagogue, and temple.

As women are beginning to discover specific ways in which their experience and views have not been taken into consideration, they have begun to review the traditions to try and recover what is life-giving to them. By finding neglected elements in our respected traditions, much like the women in my family did, we can re-interpret and re-establish claims for just and equitable treatment of women.

At the eve of the obvious rewriting of the human rights covenant from a feminist perspective, a recovery of religious wisdom must happen, making them hospitable to women. We are living in a time of global transition. The women’s movement is also becoming globalized. The sisters in Africa know the conditions the sisters in India are living under. Religion provides a vision for humanity, but also needs to provide a constructive force to recreate equality and harmony.

There are many women who have difficulty in tuning into these thoughts and spiritual problems, because the daily struggle for life and survival against death, in all its varied forms, demands all the energy they can get. Among them, and even right in their vanguard, are women like Domatilla de Chungara from the tin mines of Bolivia. She organized a hunger strike in the midst of starvation. Or Rigoberta Menchu, or the women of the Playa de Mayo, the Filipino nuns and their fight against prostitution.

“For centuries, we women have been possessed by spirit that used to cripple us. The evil spirit of female weakness caused us to be bowed down and bent double. And so I see before me the mother in Soweto, bent double with grief over her child shot down. She had brought it into the world hoping for a better time. But then at once she straightened up and began to praise god. The spirit that used to cripple us is standing up straight, and we are beginning to think and act. The picture I see before me now: mothers in the Pacific, after nuclear tests have given birth to jellyfish babies and are screaming from the root tops. You spoilers of the ocean, our beaches, our children. Test your weapons over Washington DC.” Barbel von Wattenberg Potter.

A global framework with a spiritual perspective needs to be emphasized in addressing the issue of women’s human rights. There needs to be a women’s agenda in the spirit and human rights conversation.

boona cheema is the executive director of Building Opportunities for Self – Sufficiency (BOSS). First published at the BOSS Website: http://www.self-sufficiency.org Reprinted with permission.

By Ritu Primlani 

In this day and age, we humans live fragmented lives in cities of fragmented logic. My favorite story is when my friend Linda Van Houten of Juneau, Alaska happened to be at the airport, and watched a man disembark his plane along with a little boy. Being the good Alaskan she is, she said, “Welcome to Alaska!  What brings you to this great land?”   

“I have heard the bears are dying out in Alaska,” he said. “So I have brought my son here,” he continued, “to shoot one before they are all gone.” 

Or the time I sat with an Indian couple who were doctors in New Jersey. The wife told me how she was working with Indians with HIV in New York and New Jersey. In one instance, she told a woman that her husband had HIV, and that she must not have unprotected sex with him.

She replied, “He is my husband, if he wants me to have kids, I’ll bear them for him.”  The doctor, frantic now, said, “Don’t you understand? If you have unprotected sex with him, not only will he die, you will die, and your children will probably die too.” The woman said, “No, he’s my husband, I’ll do what he says.”  I wiped a tear from my eye. I thought how passionate this woman is about her work!  And then the good doctor took me upstairs to show me her jewellery, and showed me a bear claw. I was taken aback. I said, “Er… what is that?”  Her reply was, “Oh, that’s a bear claw.” I said, “But don’t you know how they got it? It wasn’t like they ran after the bear and clipped its nails!!”  She said, “Yes, but what can you do?”

From that day forth, all my mother in Alaska has to say to piss me off, is, “Yes, but what can you do?”  And I go scarlet … each time.We live fragmented lives in cities of fragmented logic in a further fragmented world. We are not told that the detergent we use has neurotoxins in it, that the electricity we use will likely cause Polar Bears to starve. We don’t know that everything is interconnected, and we insist on acting like nothing matters, that we can do what we like with no consequences.

And isn’t it interesting, Indians who have known the sanctity of life, who were known for their minimal consumption in the ancient medical and lifestyle traditions of Ayurveda, Yoga, Homeopathy, and Jains who are so kind they do not even eat garlic— lest they kill the plant that provides them food— today have been hit by sophisticated consumption that leaves us entirely ignorant and unconcerned with the true impact of that which we consume. Taking a cloth bag to do grocery as our parents did is too much, and changing light bulbs to energy efficient ones is crowded out with so many other things that are more important. More important than the lives of oceanic creatures who get to eat, drink, and choke on our plastic bags; in some areas of oceans broken down plastic is more prolific than zooplankton. It’s not in our backyard, when we dump plastic bags into the ocean, but it is the air they breathe; it is their home. We don’t know that when polar bears die out, we are next in line. Can you imagine!  One species on earth of the millions habiting it is responsible for killing off most others? What hubris! What a claim to fame! We can’t live without our animal and plant brothers and sisters.

We don’t care for them today because we don’t know how they help us live. And even if they didn’t, don’t they have a right to a healthy and long life?When did we change from being responsible adults to five year olds who don’t care what they consume, what they break, and throw things away like they are disposable? Each generation, it seems, asks us to go faster, do faster, talk faster, eat faster. More labor saving devices, less time. It seems we live in a bubble of denial, where doing right by the survival of mankind is an option, not integral to our daily lives. How far would our lives go when we keep damaging all life around us? Having no time to care is tantamount to not having time to make sure our children survive. Not caring is not caring whether our grandparents and our children live or die.I am not asking you to care for the environment; that would be a mistake. I am asking you to look at your life and ensure the survival of your own children, your nieces and nephews. We aren’t doing anyone any favors. We are not noble if we love and care for our trees. We are merely thanking them for giving us life (for where is oxygen maintained?). We are not heroes if we don’t buy plastic. We are just making sure we don’t poison our waters to the point where we can’t drink them. We are not vigilantes if we refuse toxic chemicals. We are merely making sure we don’t drink those chemicals later on.

Look at Ganga, the most sacred of rivers in the world. A study actually showed that the oxygen capacity of Ganga was higher than other rivers, indicating that it had the ability to purify greater than other rivers. Can any city in India now recognize that Ganga? Have we not turned her into an open sewer where we wash our economic and civil sins? Today Ganga is dying from anthropocentric contributions to her— dyes, pesticides, biological waste— all dumped into her because we don’t live in it.

Don’t we see that Ganga is our artery that brings life-giving blood to our bodies that is part of that greater body, without which we cannot survive? Don’t we see that trees are our lungs? How long can we mutilate our host, how long can we keep demanding from our mother earth till she has nothing to give? And give she will, as mothers do, with her last breath. What kind of children are we, to demand such horrible things of our mother that kills her to give us? What have we done to help her lately? To show her that we love her? When have we said, mother, here, take this, rather than whining “I want, I want, I want” constantly? When have we said, no, I won’t ask for this because this will inject poison into you, mother, and I don’t want you to get sick, I want you to be strong and healthy?

When did we get so myopic that our sanctity is cloistered in our temples, churches, mosques, and gurudwaaras? Isn’t God everywhere? Let us stretch our sanctity into our daily lives. Let us liberate our prayer from the walls of our temples into our homes and businesses. Would our God accept us as a devotee if we kick and beat her other creations? The ground I walk on is sacred. Right now, right here. This is my religion, this is my God, this is my mother. And till the day we walk that walk, and talk that talk, let us not delude ourselves with the notion that we are worshipping our Gods with sweet-smelling incense; we are worshipping our Gods with broken light bulbs. 

Ritu Primlani is the founder and Executive Director of Thimmakka’s Resources for Environmental Education, a California based environmental non-profit. Ms. Primlani is among the most prominent global social entrepreneurs. She has designed and implemented a program of comprehensive environmental outreach to restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area, called Thimmakka Certified Green Restaurants (TCGR). She specializes in critiquing and assisting nation-wide infrastructures that promote environmentalism and social equity. She is the recipient of the national Environmental Leadership Fellowship 2003, United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Heroes award in 2003, the state of California’s highest and most prestigious honor – the California Governor’s Award 2003, the national Volvo Hometown Hero award 2004, the San Francisco Bay Area Community Hero award 2004, the Ashoka Innovators for the Public Social Entrepreneurs Fellowship 2004-07, and has been named among the top 50 most powerful environmental leaders in the United States by Organic Style magazine, and among the top 40 business leaders by the East Bay Business Times, 2005, and the 35 Under 35 award for exceptional businesswomen around the world, World Business Report, 2007.

Ms. Primlani can be reached at thimmakka@thimmakka.org

Website:  www.thimmakka.org