We became aware during the pandemic of the uselessness of the elderly, when thousands of elderly people died in distress and abandonment, far from their loved ones.
How old are people in Quebec? It depends on the age of the person using the term.
Personally, I only felt old through the eyes of others. Because, apparently, I don’t yet need to “repair for years the irreparable outrage”. In fact, people have been telling me for a few years that I don’t look my age. Because through social networks each person has no more secrets. The age is revealed and cheerfully commented on.
However, who can claim that ageism does not exist in Quebec? That old age does not bother? That Quebec society, once respectful of the elderly, has little consideration for those who seem to be visibly wasting away, because they would carry nostalgia for the past by taking a critical look at the present?
- Listen to Denise Bombardier’s editorial on Richard Martineau’s show broadcast via QUB radio :
impatient youth
New generations live in the moment. Impatience lives in them. Moreover, young people believe that they invented the world through the technological society. Memory and history are useless preoccupations of which the old would be the sole repositories in their drivel.
Last Sunday, during the broadcast The voice, we attended a masterful lesson on old age thanks to the presence of the singer Corneille. A singer, Nadia-Lise Péronne, 76, and an 18-year-old singer, Nathaël Young, were in competition. Unfortunately, the latter had a memory lapse and had to interrupt his performance. His coach Marjo allowed young Nathaël to resume his song. This caused an outcry on social networks where this intervention was denounced, perceived as the expression of ageism in the Quebec way.
It was then that Corneille spoke. “I come from a continent where growing old is a privilege. […] In Africa, the older you get, the more you gain in years, it is all the more stripes that you have and which say to all the rest of society, respect, attention, affection m is due because I am your origin.”
- Listen to Denise Bombardier’s editorial on Richard Martineau’s show broadcast via QUB radio :
Disappearance of the majority
The aging of the Quebec population is all the more dramatic in that it is inseparable from the gradual disappearance of the French-speaking majority.
I am neither stupid nor fooled. Even though I was weak in mathematics, the only school subject that bored me, I can count enough to know that I have relatively few years left before I celebrate my hundredth birthday.
However, I am surrounded by young old people, grumpy, full of themselves and devoid of humor. People unable to understand the second degree of language and whose intellectual thinness is to make you cry. Sad people, feeling bad about themselves and, to tell the truth, crushed by a fatigue of living which is expressed more by a permanent and hopeless restlessness.
Yet old people are ageless when they manage to retain attributes of youth of heart, spontaneity, combativeness and lucidity. They are happier people than demanding paranoid young wokes.