PART I
BETTY WHITE, dead at 99, just 17 days shy of 100.
As of July of 2021, there are 12 822 centenarians in Canada; 80% are women. So one might ask, what’s the big deal then? Betty White was a working actor until the day she died.
And not just a bit player either. She did stand-ups, hosted Saturday Night Live, and appeared on talk shows.
There was not a week where “Entertainment Tonight” made no mention of her in the last couple of years of her life. So it was, in a way, a death watch, albeit not in a long-term care facility, but out in the most public of venues, entertainment. A life well lived indeed.
To say that our very own ” Hurricane” Hazel McCallion is doing well at 101 has to be the biggest understatement for the people who have followed her career as the longest-serving mayor of Mississauga. ( “retired” at 93, in 2014, after serving 36 years as mayor ).
On a rock wall at 98! You read that right, climbing a rock wall at age 98 and on ice skates at 93. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAyJ_2MuaVM ).
On her 90th birthday in 2011, Dr. Barbara Clive, a geriatrician who assessed McCallion, stated that “at 90 her gait is perfect, her speech is totally sharp, and she has the drive to still run this city. She’s the poster child for seniors.”
“We forget that ‘old’ in age typically does not mean ‘old’ in terms of relevance.”
Author: Craig D. Lounsbrough
Now don’t get me wrong, I have only used these names because they are public figures and in no way suggesting that it’s them who have a monopoly in being relevant in the twilight of their lives.
I also like to point out that physical fitness is only part of the picture. What about cognitive longevity? Many studies show that high cognition and mental acuity go hand in hand with the fit and physically healthy people.
Ms. McCallion is on several boards of major corporations. In a talk show, Betty White proved that she was tangible and cerebral. My mother, at 98, has no trouble remembering many things that challenge my memory.
These are all examples of mental fitness. We have to be cognitively fit before we can be relevant.
HOW MANY OF US WILL STAY CURRENT LATE IN OUR LIVES?
Cognitively relevant is the operative word here. All of us have the potential of reaching our centenary and beyond, but how many of us will stay current, late in our lives.
The most purposeful life may be the most insignificant to others. Meaning is unique to our own experiences and circumstances. You could be leading the most meaningful life according to you, but it may be the most irrelevant in today’s context. “A legend in your own mind,” so to speak.
A sectarian worldview is an example of a meaningful tenet that has lost relevance—driven by a position shaped by societies trapped in a box and sustained by an ideology steeped in an immutable absolutist doctrine. But, of course, when one hears nothing else, bias overwhelms, and they only hear: “religion is more relevant than ever before.”
If humanity didn’t do anything else since Moses, the stuff of our intellectual discussion would still be the “Burning Bush” and Noah’s Ark! And we would have nothing but Fr. Jerry Orbos’ “Moments” as serious reading! I view these dinosaurs in a cultural rather than a spiritual context.
When you consider the 2,000-year histories of the Abrahamic religions (some are much older, but now only on the margins or no longer practiced ), and what they are now, there is an unmistakable “secular creep” that is rapidly replacing the old norms.
Irrelevance never happens overnight, especially if you are tone-deaf. Religion is in desperate need of new content. People who think they can go on and on with anachronism only have to look at the state of many countries weighed down by archaic sectarian foundations.
On the heels of Afghanistan and Syria, Lebanon ( Beirut ), the “Paris of the Middle East,” is the latest in a long string of countries now totally ruined by warring sectarian interests.
Looking on the flip side of history, the men of science are more relevant than ever. Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Hawking- despite their antiquity, they continue to prove their pertinence.
Watson & Crick’s discovery of DNA in 1953 has become our go-to answer to nearly everything that ails humanity-COVID being the latest. Science never becomes irrelevant because concepts are only pertinent until they are replaced by one that makes better sense, in keeping with a progressive culture.
Invoking a NOVENA in the COVID pandemic is like “squeezing blood out of a turnip.” That’s what we tried to do in the 1918 Flu Pandemic and lost over 50,000,000 lives in the process. But all of that does not matter. Our conditioned brains become impervious to reason when fear overwhelms, and we lapse into the “what have I got to lose” mentality. (read: Pascal’s Wager )
As a nation, how often have we applied the phrase ” cutting edge” to anything we have done? Our vaunted ingenuity and resourcefulness could never translate to matters of substance. We have heard enough about our university standings in the 60s and what they are today.
We took pride in the number of international students enrolled at Mapua, Santo Tomas, U.P. The few who still do, do so because it’s cheaper than their home countries.
Today, the ones that matter are in Taiwan, Singapore, Hongkong, Japan. So why, what went wrong? Ours is no longer relevant.
To put it more succinctly, we were too slow to adapt; stale curriculum and inbred academics stayed on for too long. With a meager 10.6% of R&D from UP, none of our universities spend any money on research, a significant reason why our higher institutions are so inconsequential.
The Philippines was the last Asian country to adopt a K-12 education ( and one of only three countries globally with ten years of basic education at the time ). Our performance in the 2018 PISA ( Programme for International Student Assessment ) was a disaster like no other.
We placed 79th out of 79 participating countries in reading ( Canada is 6th, the U.S, 13th ) and 78th in Math and Science. I wrote a two-part article in the Sept 1st and 16th, 2019 issues of BALITA, “Dark Clouds Over Education,” about the ominous state of education in the homeland well before the results came out in Dec. 2019.
Trying to explore the factors that caused us to tank PISA, I wrote an expanded version of my commentary for Phil. Daily Inquirer, in the Sept. 1, 2020 BALITA ( link: https://www.balita.ca/the-unexplored-causes-of-the-pisa-debacle/ )
Loss of face and the shattering of the literacy myth is high up in the Filipino psyche. But, we should never minimize the hidden fallout behind a citizenry deficient in good quality education. PISA is administered to 15-year-olds. (given every three years, the 2021 PISA was canceled due to COVID )
Ten years ago, this would have been their last year of high school. Imagine how a high school graduate would navigate a highly competitive workforce ( or post high school education) with such academic deficiency.
Ten years later, the remaining two years of high school would still be a struggle to make up for a reading deficiency (math and science and the rest of the curriculum all depend on reading proficiency ), primarily developed in early education.
With an English mastery level of high school students at 1.6% and an education budget half of a UNESCO mandate of 6% of GDP, it’s going to be rough going for our public schools. ( 83% of the 27.3 M students attend public school in 2021)
Make no mistake, poor reading and lack of academic skills could signal a lifelong struggle of poor employment prospects, lower civic involvement, and a reduced expectation of growth and well-being.
It is the society politicians love, a crowd ripe for mollification, cultivated by power-hungry partisans. In no small way, poorly educated masses have a considerable footprint in a nation’s progress. Beyond these, it diminishes the ability of people to be relevant.
“THE CAPACITY TO LEARN IS A GIFT; THE ABILITY TO LEARN IS A SKILL;
THE WILLINGNESS TO LEARN IS A CHOICE”
Brian Herbert
In PART II (April 1-15 BALITA)
-Proliferation of disinformation and how we become an unwitting kindred to the problem
-Our cultural attachment to obsolescence
– Artificial Intelligence and the dawn of “Singularity”
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