Nothing to lose apart from their chains, false teeth and glasses.
To the barricades, old codgers: you're the last bastions of threatened liberty - Comment - Times Online
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Traditionally, the challenge to the power of the authorities and “the tyranny of the majority” in democracies has come from professionals, from academics and intellectuals, from the media, and from the young. These countervailing forces have all been seriously weakened.
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Where, then, are we to look for the guardians of freedom? This is where the growing cadre of healthy elderly people may be increasingly important. They no longer hope for promotion or preferment. They are not required to bite their tongue or grovel. They have no targets to deliver on, no need to devote themselves to the futile productivity of academe, no asinine mission statements to write or respond to. They are at liberty to think and to say what they like. They can therefore shout out what those who have families to feed and careers to promote — and so must remain on-message at all costs — would not dare mutter in their sleep.
Because they have nothing to lose by speaking the truth; because they may be better able to bear the stigma that results when one casts timidity and calculation to the winds, they are (to use the jargon) a “precious resource” that we can ill afford to overlook.
Elderly mavericks, by the way, should not be expected to squander themselves on the kind of futile, unthreatening rebellious gestures such as “wearing the colour purple” that Jenny Joseph envisaged in her over-anthologised poem.
This is not an argument for a cognitive gerontocracy but a call for this new and growing generation of rentiers to take up the battle to defend the freedoms they have enjoyed but which, if present trends are unopposed, their grandchildren may not.
To the barricades! Oh, my older readers or at least get blogging!