Age is one of the first traits we notice in other people.
“Ageism arises when age is used to categorize and divide people in ways that cause harm, disadvantage or injustice, and undermine intergenerational solidarity,” says the Pan American Health Organization.
For that reason, it claims to have decided to wage a frontal battle against ageism, that is, “discrimination based on age, especially against older or elderly people,” as defined by the Royal Spanish Academy.
In turn, the dictionary defines “to discriminate,” in its second meaning, as “to treat a person or group unequally for racial, religious, political, gender, age, physical or mental reasons, etc.”
As you can see, the concept of discrimination is sometimes clearly negative, as in race, religion or politics, but in other cases it becomes far more ambiguous.
Let us take gender and age.
As much as absurd gender ideology may dislike it, there are seats on Montevideo’s public buses reserved for pregnant women.
The attempt to replace that concept with “pregnant persons,” supposedly to avoid discrimination, crashes against an undeniable biological wall. Only women can be pregnant.
Without reaching Ionesco-level absurdity, it is obvious that expectant mothers deserve special protection.
Let us discriminate discrimination itself.
Aristotle said that justice consists in treating unequals unequally.
Perhaps the philosopher would not have approved of bus seats, but it is also true that women in his time did not travel on buses.
On the contrary, they remained discreetly confined to the gynaeceum, while men dealt with war, philosophy, art and killing one another.
Slaves were objects of law, used for labor and fed like any domestic animal.
Was that discriminatory?
Those were the standards of the time.
“The authority of the master over the slave is at once just and useful, though its abuse may be harmful to both,” Aristotle wrote in Politics.
But let us not go that far back.
We live in a very different age from that of the philosopher of Stagira.
Our concerns are different, such as, for example, who gets a seat on the bus.
The other form of discrimination that can be seen on the signage marking those coveted seats is the label “+60”.
It consists of a plus sign and two Arabic numerals, meaning sixty, numbers perfectly familiar to our culture.
You may wonder why I bother explaining something so obvious.
If so, it shows you do not usually ride public buses.
I do, when I have no choice, and I have gathered enough evidence to state that even if that sign were written in Greek, nothing would change.
Those seats are almost always occupied by young people absorbed in their phones, sealed inside their headphones, cut off from the real world.
A few months ago, I got on a bus.
Among several people from the “discriminated” category there were a forty-five-year-old woman and a fifteen-year-old girl.
Both were plugged into their virtual bubbles.
I was standing, and next to me an elderly woman with a cane struggled to keep her balance as the vehicle lurched forward, overcrowded and in a hurry.
I then remarked to those two ladies how remarkably well they were aging.
The woman blushed and ejected herself from the seat like a pilot in an emergency.
The teenager tried to stop her, but finally, very reluctantly, gave up her seat to the old woman.
She stared at me angrily for the rest of the ride.
What we consider to be “old age” has changed over time.
In 1900, life expectancy in Uruguay was 46.83 years for men and 49.03 for women.
So it is hardly surprising that in a 1902 police report about a home invasion carried out by four anarchists, a fifty-four-year-old woman was described as “the old lady.”
Ten years later, things had not changed much.
To be continued.