Tuesday, March 6, 2007
...not necessarily, anyway.
Received this email and thought it was worth a post. A reader takes me to task for my lack of support for John McCain, simply based on his age:
Regarding why you wouldn't vote for John McCain, you wrote, "I admit it, I'm an ageist."
I appreciate your candor, but I have to say that ageism really bothers me. Not because of political correctness. But rather, because we live in a society that increasingly leaves it up to the individual to figure out how to support themselves in their later years. And that is not an easy task. So why put that responsibility on the individual and then constrain how much or in what jobs they are able to work? That seems like a double whammy to me. Nobody else will support me, but I am limited in how I can support myself.
Now I'm not planning to run for president, and I don't want a surgeon operating on me with shaky hands. But ageism is a blanket approach and, by its nature, does not account for individual variability. But perhaps it is too much trouble to determine what each older person is qualified to do? Maybe it's just more practical to make blanket policies?
But this stuff really bothers me. And it's not like I have my head in the sand. I'm in my 40's and have been socking away as much as I possibly can into my 401K for years. But I am convinced that it will not be enough. No how, no way. So I am convinced that as long as my health and stamina hold out, I will need to keep working as much as I can, for as long as I can, in as high a paying job as I can. Because that is what it will take to survive in any kind of decent manner.
(yes, I like having good health insurance, for example....)
So if social security is not meant to really support me (I understand it was conceived of as a "supplement"), and corporate pensions are going the way of the dinosaur (and I've never worked for a company that had one anyway)....and if it's really, really hard to save enough to retire at 65 (or whenever) and support oneself till today's life expectancy....then why limit how much the individual can work? Why have that be either policy or attitude? Because what other option do people like me have? Neither the public nor the private sector has an obligation to support me through entitlements, yet at the same time, I can't do everything in my own power to support myself? Not a happy thought.
I don't think we, as a society, fully understand how hard it is for people to take responsibility for their own retirement with little public or private sector support. We will start to discover that over the coming decades. And I, for one, am not looking forward to being a guinea pig in this big socio-economic experiment.
Points taken, although in my defense I replied that in the case of the Presidency, you've basically got a job that you really can't be removed from for performance reasons and have to assume is going to last 8 years, and this is a job that ages much younger men quite horribly...so, I'm calling special pleading on the specific circumstances. The reader's point about being fearful for our old age is well-taken...personally, I expect to be working until I drop dead and am no more sanguine about old age prospects. We've stopped having children and the ones we do have don't plan on having to care for us, instead we expect the government -- Social Security and Medicare -- to help us. Not gonna happen.
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Age in and of itself should not disqualify a candidate...even for the Presidency. There should be an evaluation based on the entire individual. However, we cannot discount the fact that as we age, our health becomes increasingly more vulnerable...
and at the very least, most of us begin to slow down mentally as well as physically.
In John McCain's case, his personal health history includes malignant melanomas, a dangerous form of skin cancer. Although he is currently cancer free, history indicates that he could be prone to more melanomas...and which can spread very quickly.