I hear that they are going to change the name of one of my favorite ski resorts, Squaw Valley, to a new name still to be determined. It seems that it is offensive to Native Americans. A number of names have been changed because they are offensive to one group or another. I have no problem with that. I think sometimes there is perhaps a little over-sensitivity involved, but that’s ok. If it makes some group feel better, that is a good thing. I just don’t want to be left out.

I have a sensitivity about something that I believe at least 100 million others have, or at least should have. It isn’t even a whole word. How can just three letters change the world?

What are the three letters, and why do they affect, in a negative way, many different groups that want to get rid of them? The letters are ISM. Three letters that affect more people than all of the rest of the letters put together – at least in my world.

I will give two examples. The first one is the word Race. We all belong to a race because we define race by the container our Self lives in. It would be ridiculous to try to judge the contents of all the packages in a UPS truck just by looking at the boxes they come in, but that is what we do with humans when we talk about race.

The body has no life force. The body is just the container for the brain. If the brain dies the body becomes just a chunk of meat. We need to look at the brain to see who we are. If we do, we find there is no difference no matter what our container looks like. We are all the same. We should strike the word racism out of our dictionary and out of our lives. The world has been working on that for a long time. I hope we are getting closer so all of us can see ourselves when we are looking at another container.

The second ism that affects a few hundred thousand is Ageism. This one affects me very personally. The term sets boundaries and limits on what we can do based on our age. It makes the assumption that because our containers are a bit damaged from the journey that our brains are too. That just isn’t true.

We are still capable of doing extraordinary things. How do we define extraordinary? The dictionary says things which are strange, unusual, unexpected, surprising, bizarre and other terms like those are extraordinary, there is no reason why an elderly person can’t do those things, and we do so all the time.

Every time we do something that is outside the normal limitations that the term ageism has set for us, we are extraordinary. We need to educate the masses that we are still functional and not invisible except to them. There are times, of course, when it is best to be invisible – like when someone needs to do the dishes.