Hallelujah!
Just when I thought that, at the age of 65, I had become a casualty of cultural irrelevance and societal obsolescence, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has given me a new lease on life.
Up until last Wednesday, I was certain that my disdain for changes in social behaviour had made me an outcast. It seemed that no one under the age of 60 – okay, maybe 50 – cared for face-to-face interaction but preferred instead to Twitter and Tweet rather than talk, to fraternize on Facebook rather than speak face-to-face.
And frankly, my self-esteem was beginning to falter.
I thought that I was totally out of step when I inwardly sighed at the sight of young women shopping downtown in pyjamas, or young men continuously clutching at the low-riding waistline of their crotch-dragging jeans.
“You are an anachronism,” I said to myself as I removed my hat upon entering Home Hardware. “The future lies in technology, not gerontology! The nation’s youth no longer share your interests; you are out of step, off the mark, out of the loop. You must begin to adapt, to think like the young.”
I tried. Honestly. I gave up camping: too many bugs and it sometimes rains, getting you all wet.
I gave up fishing: too boring and cleaning fish is icky.
I quit exercising regularly: it makes your muscles really ache and who wants to sweat?
I began spending all my time indoors on my computer.
In less than a week, I had 167 new friends whom I didn’t even know before! Plus I defeated Deathman4 and Killmeister online in a game of Grand Theft Auto 4.
Everything seemed to be going great until a squirrel came to my patio door. He stood on his hind legs and pressed his little front paws and nose against the glass.
I looked up from my monitor and instantly recognized him.
He had been living under a pile of brush on the other side of my pond for two years. I was suddenly ashamed; I had not filled his squirrel feeder for almost a week!
I immediately ran outside with my bag of peanuts and walked through the ankle deep snow to the feeder. I stopped. What was that smell? Suddenly I was aware of the crisp, cold air in my lungs, the smell of winter in my nostrils.
There were living creatures around me: chickadees and a loud blue jay. Off in the distance I heard a crow. Doubt began to form in my mind. Was I on the right path? Should I really embrace the future, close the door to the outside world and became a total techno-convert? A Grey Geek?
And then it happened. As I went back inside, I heard a disembodied voice coming from my wife’s study. It was the prime minister on CBC radio, his voice conveyed through the air by that most venerable of communication technologies. It was a sign!
“Under our government, Canada will make the transformations necessary to sustain economic growth, job creation and prosperity now and for the next generation,” he was saying.
And how was he going to do it? By raising eligibility for Old Age Security payments from 65 to 67 years of age and thereby encouraging old people like me to remain in the work force longer!
We weren’t considered obsolete and irrelevant at 65 any more! Our great nation needed us after all!
In fact, it was essential that we keep working because otherwise the aging population “has the capacity to undermine Canada’s economic position and, for that matter, that of all Western nations well beyond the current economic crises.”
It is up to old people like me to save the Western World!
Grey Power indeed.
– Jim Holtz is WEEKENDER columnist and a former Grand Forks Gazette reporter
