Monday, September 17, 2012

Ageism and the Empty Chair

The story lingers of Mr. Clint Eastwood's famous monologue with an empty chair.
Did anyone else notice that Journalistic Ageism was afoot as Mr. Eastwood voiced his beliefs and opinions?
The news people often implied old fogey-isms, stereotypes, "incoherency", "speaking off script", attributing Mr. Eastwood's age was equivalent to certain senility.
Mr. Eastwood's speech was criticized because
he touched several nerves. He spelled out his opinions, legal in the US.
He had great timing, he broke boundaries, and he could because
He is Clint Eastwood!
He left many with a vision implanted of that empty chair.
Brilliance? or senility?
Or being a great director!

Just be careful if you find yourself engaging in Age-ism:
Defining elders' actions and labelling elders using negative stereotypes.
This was all about free speech and the reactions were about ageism.
Leading me to reiterate:
Freedom of speech is still fully intact in the US in all spectrums of age.
Now If you don't like that, go tell a chair.

 

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for this interesting inspiration. Decades since last I saw a movie with him. Thank you as well for the memories.

    ReplyDelete

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