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Is it fair to blame the media for us not growing old gracefully?
I always hear that the media's obsession with youth is why we have trouble with this. But there's some things that really do suck about it, like every single organ in your body doesn't work quite like it used to. Yes, at some point we get to acceptance. But there's a lot of heartache getting there.
2 Answers
- 9 years ago
Yes and no... It is the fact that our culture as a whole is willfully ignorant of the realities of aging and do our best to hide age and illness because it makes people "Uncomfortable".
We can actually document when the cultural shift took place... When either "Good Housekeeping" or "Home and Garden", some mag like that, I can't remember which one, changed the name of this room from "Parlor" to "Living Room".
Before then, when a family member died, they had the wake in the Parlor. They had the corpse in the casket displayed in the parlor and the family and friends would come over to pay their respect and then the body would be taken to the Grave Yard...
The shift from Parlor to Living Room was more than just semantics... It became about light and happiness, not dark woods and death...
Penn & Teller: Death Inc.
Streaming: http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/104669/detail/
So today, no one wants to think about Death... Illness... Disability... Doctors will complain to no end about how a patient will come into the office and say "My joints hurt! Something is wrong! FIX ME!" and then get MAD when the doctor explains that they're turning 60 soon and this is just a natural part of aging... There's nothing "Wrong" with you and you shouldn't be demanding medication for minor natural processes. Take some ibuprofen and learn to cope with reality!!!
"The Media" is given far too much credit or blame for what we do as a culture... "The Media" follows trends more than it creates them... They give the public what they are demanding and then people b*tch about what they're putting out.
If these things didn't sell, they wouldn't be doing it... So the average person has a FAR greater say in what the big, bad, evil media puts out than anyone wants to take credit for because they would have to accept that THEY are just as big a part of the problem as the editors at Red Book.
