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Banishing Gray Hair
Where has all the gray hair gone? I never really thought about it, but there doesn't seem to be very many people, outside the current President and one past President, who have gray hair these days. Not even the President's wife has gray hair. I wouldn't have thought about it, in fact, if I hadn't witnessed something that pulled me up short and opened my eyes to this trend.
I was waiting for an elevator and a woman with gray hair stood nearby. A school group of five-year-old girls came by and one stopped, looked at the woman and blurted out, "You have funny hair!" Once this was offered up like some tasty little tidbit, the rest of the group chirped in and repeated the same comment, except for one little girl who just looked on. What was she thinking? Did she know a woman with gray hair and would it be disloyal to her to make fun of another woman with gray hair? Maybe she had been taught that nice little girls don't say things to make people feel uncomfortable.
But, think about it; where have all the gray-haired people gone? This country has undergone a quiet revolution that I never noticed. Now that I'm aware, I look, mostly in vain, for people with gray hair. Men in their 80s no longer have gray hair. Women, with the exception of the late author, Susan Sontag, rarely have gray hair these days. I guess most of them got tired of being called "blue-haired ladies" or some other derogatory term. They have been shamed into hiding the fact that they are the living historians of our time, those who can tell us what it was like to live through the Depression or WWII or even WWI. What have we done to them by making them hide their mark of wisdom? In Japan, these people would be eligible to be designated National Treasures. How would that designation go over here in the US?
Does this have something to do with the fact that we are now seeing many older women who have developed panic disorder? Have we eroded their sense of dignity by this incredibly youth-worshipping culture we now endure? Has this hair-colored related stress have a negative effect on their emotions and their immune system?
I can remember when there was a saying in the '60s, "Don't trust anyone over 30." When I first heard it, I smiled to myself because I knew that these same people would be 30 one day and how would they feel then? Start a revolution and suffer the consequences, especially if it's something that dismisses the fact that there is much to be said for people over 30 or 40 or 50 or 80. Let's hear it for late Grandma Moses, the American primitives artist, and Maggie Kuhn, the founder of The Grey Panthers, who died at the age of 89, still fighting the good fight.
How many gray heads have you seen in the supermarket lately?
Related Topics: Aging Well May Mean 'Mind Over Matter', WebMD Daily Video: Getting Glamour No Matter What Your Age
Technorati Tags: grayhair, aging,
I was waiting for an elevator and a woman with gray hair stood nearby. A school group of five-year-old girls came by and one stopped, looked at the woman and blurted out, "You have funny hair!" Once this was offered up like some tasty little tidbit, the rest of the group chirped in and repeated the same comment, except for one little girl who just looked on. What was she thinking? Did she know a woman with gray hair and would it be disloyal to her to make fun of another woman with gray hair? Maybe she had been taught that nice little girls don't say things to make people feel uncomfortable.
But, think about it; where have all the gray-haired people gone? This country has undergone a quiet revolution that I never noticed. Now that I'm aware, I look, mostly in vain, for people with gray hair. Men in their 80s no longer have gray hair. Women, with the exception of the late author, Susan Sontag, rarely have gray hair these days. I guess most of them got tired of being called "blue-haired ladies" or some other derogatory term. They have been shamed into hiding the fact that they are the living historians of our time, those who can tell us what it was like to live through the Depression or WWII or even WWI. What have we done to them by making them hide their mark of wisdom? In Japan, these people would be eligible to be designated National Treasures. How would that designation go over here in the US?
Does this have something to do with the fact that we are now seeing many older women who have developed panic disorder? Have we eroded their sense of dignity by this incredibly youth-worshipping culture we now endure? Has this hair-colored related stress have a negative effect on their emotions and their immune system?
I can remember when there was a saying in the '60s, "Don't trust anyone over 30." When I first heard it, I smiled to myself because I knew that these same people would be 30 one day and how would they feel then? Start a revolution and suffer the consequences, especially if it's something that dismisses the fact that there is much to be said for people over 30 or 40 or 50 or 80. Let's hear it for late Grandma Moses, the American primitives artist, and Maggie Kuhn, the founder of The Grey Panthers, who died at the age of 89, still fighting the good fight.
How many gray heads have you seen in the supermarket lately?
Related Topics: Aging Well May Mean 'Mind Over Matter', WebMD Daily Video: Getting Glamour No Matter What Your Age
Technorati Tags: grayhair, aging,
