In the wake of such things as the grifter’s even more erratic than usual behavior and Mitch McConnell’s carefully managed return to the Senate, my social media produced another deluge of demands for putting upper age limits on public office. I just flew home through the San Francisco Airport, noticed they’d named the international terminal after Dianne Feinstein, and couldn’t help thinking how embarrassing and disastrous her last years were.
It is certainly true that some people who should have retired from their jobs much earlier keep hanging on. But I’m still opposed to age limits on most jobs, for one very basic reason: Human beings don’t age uniformly.
Nancy Pelosi was the most effective Speaker of the House the US has seen in decades. She pulled back from leadership posts and is now retiring from Congress, but she was very effective throughout her years in office. I don’t always agree with her, but I cannot deny her ability.
Nancy Pelosi is 86, two years older than Mitch McConnell.
The NY Times had a piece this week about the composer Thea Musgrave, whose opera Orlando, based on the Virginia Woolf novel, will premiere next year. The article starts with her working with a bassoonist on another piece and commenting that she is still learning.
Musgrave is 98.
I’ve just been at a writers retreat where the members ranged in age from 50s to 80s, with most of us in our 70s. All of us are still writing, all of us still smart. With the exception of the youngest of us, all have a few health issues that we pay close attention to, but none of them keep us from writing.
Of course, again with the exception of our youngest member, none of us have day jobs anymore. None of us want day jobs, but all of us want to write and publish our work.
In general, we are now producing the best work of our lives, because we are smart and have a lot of experience and both understand how to write and why we want to do it. What we do now is valuable whether it ever wins a prize or makes the best seller list.
I know people in their 50s who are old and stuck in their ways, people in their 60s with enough health issues to prevent them from doing a full time job. I know people in their 80s and 90s whose judgment is impeccable and who have fresh ideas. We don’t all age at the same pace.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, the biggest problem in politics isn’t that we have lot of old people in Congress; it’s that we have a lot of bad people there. Age limits won’t solve that problem.
So what will? Continue reading “Age Limits Aren’t the Answer”…