Aging with Purpose: Telling Our Stories

In a youth-obsessed, “anti-aging” culture—where old people should be neither seen nor heard—it’s gratifying to learn of young people who actually want to hear from their elders.

Case in point: this recent article by Audra D. S. Burch in the New York Times: “A New Class of Voting Rights Activists Picks Up the Mantle in Mississippi.” *

Here’s the opening paragraph:

The first time Howard Kirschenbaum registered voters in Mississippi was during the summer of 1964, when he was arrested and thrown in jail. The second time was on Tuesday, after returning to the Southern state more than a half-century later to support a new generation of voting rights activists.

A couple of paragraphs later:

Four veteran volunteers of Freedom Summer, now in their 70s and mostly retired, returned to the state this week to join a nonpartisan youth group, Mississippi Votes, for a voter registration campaign called Up2Us. Young and old, two full generations apart, gathered at a Jackson church, in nearby neighborhoods, on the balcony of an Oxford bookstore to talk about the perils and stakes of voter activism, then and now.

And here’s the part that stands out for me:

“There is a power that transcends our ages,” said Arekia Bennett, 25, executive director of Mississippi Votes, which has 250 volunteers and chapters on nine different college campuses across the state. “We want to dive deep into the veteran stories and learn the lessons of that summer so we can shift the narrative, make our own changes in Mississippi.”

Many of my adult writing clients want to share their life stories with their children, grandchildren, and generations to follow. Whether in a book, a short collection of letters and diary entries, or in oral interviews, they hope to, in part, pass on lessons learned.

And many of those lessons have to do not only with their personal history—where they went to school, what kind of work they did, who they married—but also with how that history was joined to the time, place, and culture within which they lived.

The NYT piece describes a time, place and culture in 1964 having to do with voting rights in the south. The stories Ms. Bennett and her colleagues want to “dive deep into” are those of activists who lived that history. They want to learn from their elders so they can make their own present-day contribution, one that will help them “shift the narrative.”

In other words, they want to learn from history, so as not to repeat it.

(With thanks to George Santayana https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Santayana)

*https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/25/us/freedom-summer-mississippi-votes.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=20&pgtype=sectionfront