Turtles live to be old. Very old. Several easily exceed the century. Baptized Jonathan, the oldest would be 190 years old. Turtles are not only long-lived, but healthy, says Rita da Silva, a university researcher in Portugal. This biologist explains, in the current issue of the magazine The Walrusthat turtles are unique in that they are less likely to die when they are old than when they are young.
This panzer-like animal bears the weight of years better than other living creatures. For what ? Because its tissues can regenerate, even at an advanced age, explains the biologist.
It is quite different with humans. Our body does not enjoy such elasticity in the face of time. It is not possible for him, past a certain age, to hope to revitalize himself as easily as before.
Of course, we are living longer. On average, life expectancy has increased. But as shown in a recent study published by the medical journal The Lancet, this tends to ignore the fact that, in several countries, among the less well-off, life expectancy has fallen for the first time in recent years. This is particularly seen in women. These are more often prone to experience poverty and misery. Their life is all the more reduced.
Turtles don’t move fast, but they live a long healthy life. When the miseries done to the body begin to make their nest irresistibly in a human, how many more years can he hope to live in full possession of all his faculties? It’s one thing to live longer than before, but you still have to know in what condition this life is lived. The only way humans have found to catch up on the years slipping away is to rely on social safety nets, such as retirement security plans. However, faced with the demolition today of social advances, it is everywhere the low-income earners who suffer this setback.
In Quebec, it is possible to receive retirement support from the age of 60. Where does the idea suddenly come from that this accessibility should be postponed to 62, or even 65? The Legault government undertook, on the sly, to examine this question, as if having, at the end of one’s life, time to oneself constituted a simple recreation without meaning. Why this consultation on a question when nothing calls for it?
The speeches are always the same when it comes to slashing social gains. The gains of the past are presented as tensions, as a dam against modernization, a rigidity in the face of the flexibility demanded by our free-market ayatollahs.
Everything cracks. Fatigue, exhaustion and despair accumulate as the hellish pace of financial profit continues to increase, much to the delight of shareholders and CEOs
Between 1995 and 2015, the percentage of seniors who reported working almost doubled in Canada, while the number of people covered by a pension plan decreased. Since then, the curve has continued to grow. Do you really think it’s only because people are bored at home? The figures indicate that a large proportion of older workers are those who depend on their employment income. In other words, they have no choice but to row.
Labor Minister Jean Boulet has repeatedly said he is happy to see people over 65 returning to work en masse. How can he be happy about that, knowing why most people have to? Working until the grave to manage to pay for groceries is nothing particularly pleasing.
Last July, at Duty, the Minister of Labor even went so far as to advance, without any embarrassment, not to exclude the idea of pushing back the retirement age! “We are in constant reflection”, he said then in a pirouette.
For his part, Prime Minister Legault affirms that there is no reason to get upset in front of a downward review of the age of eligibility for the Quebec Pension Plan. Anyway, there will be no protest here on this subject, he indicated, pushing back the specter of demonstrations like those which are currently shaking France. Is this the sagging traits of his own combativeness that show up? This mediocre combativeness which leads him to crash in front of Ottawa, this time at the time of claiming what to finance health care. Is it his own spinelessness that he projects in this way on the faces of his compatriots in order to make himself believe that his compatriots are not holding on to their achievements in terms of retirement?
At the time of the 1980 referendum, the passions aroused among the elderly at the prospect of losing their “pension cheques” were not unrelated to what they had endured in the past. These people had often had only necessity for a teacher. It was enough to threaten them with losing the little they had gained from this system to see them defend it. Today, the Canadian political order is no longer questioned at all by the national-conservatives of Caquistan. This very provincial government is going back to the days of Duplessis by suggesting, even on the occasion of a by-election, that the future is being played out through tax cuts and the distribution of gifts in the form of cheques. There is no question for him of wondering how the resulting underfunding of social systems can explain, for example, the poor state of hospitals and schools.
Basically, the only thing we are asked to save is our skin. But we are not turtles. We do not carry our house on our backs, hurrying slowly towards a happy old age. Without the help of others, of society, which is our true home, we will not grow old.