I was horrified to discover that the “elderly woman” described by a journalist on RNZ’s website was a mere 67. Okay, I am in my 60s, too, and if I was 20 I would probably agree with the classification, but I’m not and I don’t. Sixty-seven is just two years past retirement age. Does that mean that we have a whole lot of elderly or almost elderly people running our hospitals, schools and, dare I say it, government? Scary, because the classification “elderly” implies frailty, someone who isn’t really capable of looking after themselves, let alone an institution.
I don’t want someone deciding things about me based on my age, culture, gender or anything else. I’ll let you know when I feel elderly.
The need to classify everything is maybe human nature, but it is frustrating. We classify people by many things, including disability, race, gender and culture, and it generally works to deny entry into our world of people we see as different to us. It highlights our perceived differences.
On the other hand, it can be used to elicit emotion. “Grandmother of three plummeted to her death on her birthday” will elicit emotion in the reader in a way that “Person died after falling down a bank” will not, because we don’t picture that person and weave a story around them. Is it more tragic that this person was a grandmother? What about if it was a middle-aged man who likes watching porn? Or a tourist? We don’t need that extra information and it could be argued that we don’t need to know about someone’s personal tragedy at all.
I remember way back when I was young (before I became almost elderly), I told a friend how devastated I felt when I heard about some people who had been taken hostage; that they must be terrified. Obviously, most people would be suffering in a situation like this, but my friend told me it wasn’t up to me to decide how other people felt, that someone might see it as the most exciting thing that had ever happened to them.
It sounded wrong to me, but she is right: we assume that others feel something in the way we do.
Is there a points system that tells us how tragic a death is? Elderly, hmm, that’s a tricky one. Defenceless, but also have lived most of their life already. Tourist? They are not “like us” because they are from somewhere else, but then they are away from home. That’s sad, isn’t it? Disabled? What does that mean, anyway? The word “alone” elicits sympathy.
Nobody wants unsolicited sympathy. It is demeaning and creates powerlessness. There is a whole other outrage in me over that one. We should be better than this.
Journalists have a mission to inform their audience and they do a great job in these times when there are so many alternatives to reading newspapers or listening to the radio. Thank goodness the harmful practice of describing people by race when they are involved with a crime has almost disappeared.
Presumably, having more information about a person makes a narrative that we will be drawn into. We gravitate towards stories that involve personal tragedy, even if it makes us sad. Most news we read is tragic in some way or other, so we can end up sad a lot. If that helps to motivate us to become involved in a positive way, well, that’s great, but I suspect it doesn’t most of the time.
The line from Garbage’s Only Happy When it Rains goes, “You know I love it when the news is bad”, but who gets to define bad? I think there are a lot of decisions being made for us around how to feel and about who is the most deserving. Maybe we need to start thinking for ourselves.
Clare Goodwin is a heritage tomato grower and occasional author who lives in Banks Peninsula.
