Joe Biden will be a candidate for the White House at 82, Warren Buffett is one of the great planetary investors at 92, the same as one of the most feared financiers like George Soros and a communication magnate like Rupert Murdoch. Pope Francis is 85, Nancy Pelosi has been Speaker of the House of Representatives until she was 83 and, in case we still had doubts that age doesn’t matter, just look at Harrison Ford at 80, embodying the role of Indiana. Jones in The Dial of Fate, which premiered Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival. Ageism is dead, or at least is in worse health than gerontocracy.
The increase in life expectancy and the greater confidence that gray hair provokes in many population groups is making it not so great to be young, as an old slogan from El Corte Inglés proclaimed. Or, at least, that age is less of a barrier than it was in other times.
When in the last pandemic we saw in the Community of Madrid how advanced age was an element of discrimination to access hospitals, our bodies were bad. Verifying how people of eighty or ninety years of age appear in positions of responsibility and contribute their experience constitutes the best denunciation of that malpractice.
And it should also be a factor for reflection in France, where raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 years has served to set the streets of Paris on fire again, when the pension fund is emptied with the greatest life expectancy. Not all professions are the same, nor do they require the same effort, but certainly talent is often lost through early retirement.
Indy appears in the film alone, somewhat helpless and unarmed. but surely he is a little wiser. In his meeting with the press, Harrison Ford said that the true heroes of our time are the old. And when he was given an honorary Palme d’Or by surprise, he was moved and tears came to his eyes. Time makes us more sensitive. For a moment the actor looked somewhat clumsy, like Indiana Jones. But above all dignified, as Harrison Ford has always been.