A week from today I’ll be joining Bill Thomas & team onstage in Columbus for the Midwest swing of his Second Wind Tour as its anti-ageism Agitator in Chief. So far the tour—a five-hour “nonfiction theater” combination of words, film and music—has centered around personal growth and reimagining aging, but from this point out they’re taking advantage of having me on the bus to focus on ageism.
Based on slogans that my growing network of activists and age scholars and I came up with—thank you, everyone!—the Second Wind team has developed nine graphics for this image-based campaign, which will run off the Second Wind Tumblr and onto Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. Please follow wherever you hang out, and use the hashtag #EndAgeism along with #secondwind to catch performance updates. Here are next week’s venues: five cities in five days! Good thing the seats on the bus recline.
Thomas is a geriatrician and a renowned expert on humane institutional long-term care, and I’ve long appreciated his outspoken position on ageism. He knows that the way we institutionalize olders living with frailty is a symptom of the broader issue—the social construction of aging as a problem—and that the only real remedy is to end discrimination and stereotyping on the basis of age. We hope the Second Wind Tour’s #EndAgeism Campaign will bring practitioners and policymakers around to this point of view, and I’m very excited to be spearheading it.
Ashton,
Perfect timing. Thank you for leading the charge! No doubt that your Midwest seat (chair) on Bill’s SWT bus will be rockin’ and we’ll do our best out here to cheer you and the team on.
Your Geronaut sticker is on the way and I plan to introduce your anti-ageism messages in my classes and in our Portland and Seattle ACT III events.
Nice..