No one looks forward to aging — and as someone who has a birthday next week, I really dread having to get a fake ID to actually make myself younger.
But there is one upside when I ultimately cross over to the AARP-side: saying whatever the f - - k I want, public opinion be damned.
Take, for instance, grizzled 83-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg, esteemed Supreme, who earlier this week went on a tear about Donald Trump’s candidacy.
Despite the egregious misjudgment for a judge — whose job by definition is to appear impartial — to so capriciously opine on a presidential election, I kind of applaud the old broad.
After all, hurling those kind of inflammatory remarks, knowing full well public rebuke was waiting at her doorstep, is a right that comes with ripe old age. RBG takes a page right out of the playbook of “Golden Girls” fictional spunky senior, Sophia Petrillo, who zinged withering one-liners like, “Jealousy is a very ugly thing, Dorothy, and so are you in anything backless.”
It’s called chutzpah — and most of us have to wait the better part of our lives before we can properly unleash it onto the world.
You hold it in for so many years, you can sometimes almost forget you actually have an opinion.
Like generations of old biddies before her, Darth Bader feels she’s earned the right to tell it like it is. Great saucy truth-tellers have paved the way, including the 103-year-old Georgia granny who was booted from her Baptist church last year for criticizing the pastor; 96-year-old Maggie Griffin, mom of verbal assassin Kathy Griffin, who shocks the masses with brazen tweets like “I feel the same way about Ted Cruz as I do when I get the runs”; and my own great-Aunt Ruth, who never missed an opportunity to — relentlessly — ask my mom when she was finally going to get a supportive bra, while wondering aloud how we can afford such a “charming starter house” on a teacher’s salary.
Wildly inappropriate and unfiltered as she is, I have to give RBG credit for ranting whenever she pleases. It’s particularly liberating for a woman of a certain age to finally feel free — especially after a lifetime of implied societal constraints that force her to bite her lip more times than she can remember, choking on the blood of restraint while she does it.
You hold it in for so many years, you can sometimes almost forget you actually have an opinion.
Sure, I can’t wait for the world to eat my words one day. When I’m an old unbridled bag of bones like Bader, I’ll happily unshackle myself from the (real or imagined) court of public opinion that holds us all back from our unfiltered thoughts — because the only opinion that should really matter is one’s own.