Put on your seatbelts, folks, because it’s “soapbox” time!

Here’s my basic premise: Aging is not an affliction; it’s an achievement. (Feel free to put that on a couple hundred thousand T-shirts.)

No kidding, think about it: Given the demographics of Western Washington (one out of three of us are 60 or better — in many cases, much better), and the fact that even the feds (often the last to know anything that is painfully obvious) have recognized that America is getting older, it seems that all we ever hear about is how Elders are a “problem” — there are too many of us, there are going to be even more of us, we use up too many resources, take up too much space, breathe too often and generally consume more resources than somebody somewhere decided we should.

Gee, I’m real sorry. Allow me to take this opportunity to apologize for surviving.

But what if aging isn’t a “problem” that needs to be “solved”? What if attaining the rank of Elderhood is a milestone, not a millstone? The implicit (and, often, explicit) suggestion is that, if you’re an Elder, there is something intrinsically wrong with you; thus, you need “help.”

We hear those words all the time: help, needs, services, programs — wow! I must need “help” and I’m just too stupid to realize it! I’d better sit down and rest up for my next attack of stunning incompetence!

Now, are there older folks who need “help”? Well, of course! But there are also kids who need “help,” and adolescents and young adults and middle-agers. “Seniors” (I’m sorry, but I still detest that term) do not have a corner on the “help” market.

So, what’s the deal? Seems to me that we’re hung up between looking back at another time when you worked hard, retired for a couple of years, then died conveniently (on schedule) … and being obsessed with “pre” (and barely “post”) pubescent youth. (Think about that for a minute: Can you envision a nation of smartphone-obsessed “tweens,” tweeting their way onto the world stage? I know: Kinda makes you want to get your brain tattooed, doesn’t it?)

So, if you’re not one of “those,” or you’re not “producing” in the traditional gross-national-product fashion, you must be “them” — because you’re certainly not “us.” And if you’re not “us,” you must need “help.”

All right, pulling myself back from the brink of pronoun-induced delirium, let’s vault to a downright revolutionary, if not openly heretical idea: What if aging isn’t the problem? What if it’s the solution?

Despite the often quoted lyric from an old “Who” song, “Hope I die before I get old,” you’ll notice that most of us didn’t; that is, we figured out what a cataclysmically stupid idea that was, so here we are. Therefore, we must think that survival is superior to its obvious alternative.

So, then, what if we begin to acknowledge the experience of aging as being universal — it happens to almost everybody! — and start figuring out how to make that work for us?

Consider, for a moment, Washington’s coastal counties. Between those of us who are “aging in place” (a bureaucratic term meaning that you’re from here, or you’ve been here for so long that you forgot where you were from before) and the excruciatingly well-documented “in-migration of retirees” (another bureaucratic phrase referring to folks who are smart enough to figure out that being here is a bit more tolerable than, say, West LA) do you have any idea of the incredible knowledge, experience, innovation and just plain toughness that is walking around here?

Do we have the foggiest notion of the virtually untapped energy and creativity we’re trying to relegate to pathetic invisibility? Who do we think has the money? Where do we think our future employees (and managers and board members and inventors and problem-solvers) are coming from? Romper Room? I don’t think so.

One of the problems is that we just haven’t figured out how to exploit Elders, the same folks who got us this far, thank you very much. Yup, I said “exploit.” Look: When there were a lot of trees, we figured out how to make trees keep us alive. When there were a lot of fish, we figured out how to make fish keep us alive. Now, there are a lot of Elders.…

I’m not at all sure I’m through, but I’m willing to stop — for now. We need to get away from the mirror and get over to the window and see what we see — because what we’ll see is a palette of pastel gray.

So, go get your T-shirt: Aging is not an affliction; it’s an achievement.

Mark Harvey is the director of information and assistance for the Olympic Area Agency on Aging. He can be reached by email at harvemb@dshs.wa.gov; by phone at 360-532-0520 in Aberdeen, 360-942-2177 in Raymond, or 360-642-3634; or through Facebook at Olympic Area Agency on Aging-Information & Assistance.