The grandfather

Nowadays being old is politically incorrect. To avoid using the word, a series of euphemisms have been invented. For example, some newspapers have a section called Longevity. Training programs are announced for senior adults or seniors 65+. The word old or grandparent for an unknown person is considered derogatory. There is also the word ageism to define discriminatory treatment towards older people.Before, Catalans affectionately called Francesc Macià The Grandfather. Although he was old (he was seventy-two when he took over the presidency of the Generalitat in April 1931), the people loved him as if he were family, hence this nickname. At that time, and in a more traditional society, cultural practices placed the elderly person at the center. In Macià's case, there was something more: his figure was revered for the trust people placed in his way of taking care of the country. He was old and, above all, he was trustworthy because he had experience.What has happened to the veneration and respect for grandparents? We could isolate at least two factors from today's world: on the one hand, the non-acceptance of the inexorable passage of time. Everything must be reversible and fast. Technology, a continuous present, does not foresee time with consequences. A second factor is the contempt for experience. Experience includes not only the set of experiences a person has accumulated over time but, above all, what they have learned over the years, the result of having lived. The contemporary world rejects the elaboration time that experience requires to be transmitted and understood.Currently, there is the idea that growing old is an injustice and a problem that, in the future and with the help of technoscience, we will be able to solve. Meanwhile, it bothers everyone a lot. Old people do not want to grow old and do everything possible to delay the moment. Young people complain that they have to look after old people, especially now during the holidays, when cities empty and families have to take turns. They find it hard to accept that old people are old, because they do not want to see that they will be too.The French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller once said that being old is being inhabited by the same desire as always without having the physical resources to make it apparent. In this sense, being old ultimately means ending up confronting the limit of the precariousness of the body and sometimes also of the mind. Contemporary society rejects any limit that obstructs omnipotence: Trump is the paradigm of the old man who pretends not to be one.Being old means legitimizing the memory of what we have learned in life. The duty of society as a whole is to empower this life, the experience it entails in teaching the younger ones what the old have learned from all that they have lived through. Thus, future generations will know who they are, where they come from. They will acquire a sense of belonging and legitimacy.Then we will remember Macià, and the other grandparents and the lessons of his life.