Word: ageism
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...treat them with what Novelist Saul Bellow calls "a kind of totalitarian cruelty, like Hitler's attitude toward Jews." It is as though the aged were an alien race to which the young will never belong. Indeed, there is a distinct discrimination against the old that has been called ageism. In its simplest form, says Psychiatrist Robert Butler of Washington, B.C., ageism is just "not wanting to have all these ugly old people around." Butler believes that in 25 or 30 years, ageism will be a problem equal to racism...
...just cruelty and indifference that cause ageism and underscore the obsolescence of the old. It is also the nature of modern Western culture. In some societies, explains Anthropologist Margaret Mead, "the past of the adults is the future of each new generation," and therefore is taught and respected. Thus, primitive families stay together and cherish their elders. But in the modern U.S., family units are small, the generations live apart, and social changes are so rapid that to learn about the past is considered irrelevant. In this situation, new in history, says Miss Mead, the aged are "a strangely isolated...
...ranker injustices of ageism can be alleviated by governmental action and familial concern, but the basic problem can be solved only by a fundamental and unlikely reordering of the values of society. Social obsolescence will probably be the chronic condition of the aged, like the other deficits and disabilities they learn to live with. But even in a society that has no role for them, aging individuals can try to carve out their own various niches. The noblest role, of course, is an affirmative one - quite simply to demonstrate how to live and how to die. If the aged have...
...expend it on those who have a long life ahead. There is also the still-powerful influence of Freud. If one's behavior is believed to be programmed in the first years of life, one cannot hope to change that program substantially during old age. (Freud, who contributed to ageism, was also its victim. At 81, discussing "the many free hours with which my dwindling analytical practice has presented me," he added: "It is understandable that patients don't surge toward an analyst of such an unreliable...