新视野大学英语读写教程听力 第四册 课文 te-08c_new

[-1:-1.00]Old people are sent off to their own prisons.
[-1:-2.00]Frequently they will say they like it better.
[-1:-3.00]But who would not when,
[-1:-4.00]to be with younger people is so often to be invisible,
[-1:-5.00]to be treated as irrelevant, and sometimes even as disgusting.
[-1:-6.00]We have systematically looked down on old women,
[-1:-7.00]kept them out of productive life,
[-1:-8.00]judged them primarily in terms of failing capacities and functions,
[-1:-9.00]and then found them pitiful. We have put old women in nursing "homes"
[-1:10.00]with absolutely no intellectual stimulation,
[-1:11.00]isolated from human warmth and contact,
[-1:12.00]and then condemned them for losing their mental abilities.
[-1:13.00]We have disrespected and disregarded old women,
[-1:14.00]and then dismissed them as uninteresting.
[-1:15.00]We have made old women invisible
[-1:16.00]so that we do not have to confront our society's myths
[-1:17.00] about what makes life valuable or dying painful.
[-1:18.00]Having done that,
[-1:19.00]we then attribute to the process of ageing per se
[-1:20.00]all the evils we see and fear about growing old.
[-1:21.00]It is not ageing that is awful,
[-1:22.00]nor whatever physical problems may accompany ageing.
[-1:23.00]What is awful is how society treats old women and their problems.
[-1:24.00]To the degree that we accept and allow such treatment
[-1:25.00]we buy the ageist assumptions that permit this treatment.
[-1:26.00]What then does it really mean to grow old?
[-1:27.00]For me, first of all, to be old is to be myself.
[-1:28.00]No matter how society may classify me as invisible and powerless, I exist.
[-1:29.00]I am a person, a sexual being, a person who struggles,
[-1:30.00]for whom there are important issues to explore, new things to learn,
[-1:31.00]challenges to meet, beginnings to make, risks to take,
[-1:32.00]endings to think about.
[-1:33.00]Even though some of my options are reduced, there are new paths ahead.