Compelled by nature and/or destiny to struggle endlessly between communicating reality and the reality of communicating, I now propose to let loose a flood of figures, followed by relevant considerations, and finally by some pontificating on how all that is (or is not) communicated by the mass media. So let’s start: today, one in four Italians is over 60 years old. Italy leads the list of the world’s “oldest” nations, followed, among others, by Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Spain and Great Britain - all having an over-60 population between 21% and 25%. At the bottom of the list, together with other African countries like Kenya and Angola but with other so-called Third World countries as well, is Nigeria, whose over-60 population fraction is 3%.
So the old continent, as by definition, is Europe, and we are at the heart of this “oldness”. There’s more: in 1950, people over 60 made up 8% of the world population, in 2000 they were 10% and in 2005 they will be 21%, at which point old-timers will be more numerous than children under 15. I have many more figures to give, but let’s stop at these, the main ones. Where do these data come from? From the United Nations World Assembly on Ageing, held in Madrid during the second week of April, in the presence of representatives of 164 countries and of more than 6000 delegates from NGOs (non-governmental organizations). A good deal of considerations cascade from these data, beginning with the troubling scenario of a planet-scale economical crisis that such a rate of ageing entails, at least in terms of probability: serious unbalances, in the more developed countries, between people who work, produce income and pay taxes, and people who live on pensions, not to mention the increasing demographic gap between wealthy and poor countries, migrations/invasions, multiethnic integration, and so on.
Getting back to Italy and to its old-age leadership, all this translates into a series of analyses, questions and problems connected with the possibility of ensuring acceptable levels of assistance to senior citizens (a new name for this magazine might be Old Leadership Medica), but also, I believe, into an urgent need to reconsider our life, our cities, our countryside, etc. In conclusion: do these issues deserve appropriate attention from the media in a culturally civilized country? What else do we need to make the public opinion in Italy aware of a problematic future that concerns us all and that is here at hand? Being informed, you might reply, should be sufficient.
But the attention of the Italian media was practically non-existent - which is absolutely disgraceful - concentrated as we were on the Cogne murder case or on the nomination of RAI directors, when not, rightly, on the Middle East tragedy. In Madrid, foreign journalists wanting to find out what the Italians – or those who should keep them informed – think about population ageing and its effects on the world’s oldest country, were forced to take note that Italian media seem not to care at all. With their scanty presence in Madrid, and hardly any reports in the newspapers, on TV or on the radio, a matter of epoch-making import stands unattended, in all its levels outlined above. I have to admit that yours truly, in the lifeboat of his daily radio programme, has already sailed these seas. Alone. I’m growing old, that’s the truth...
Traslated by Interpres