One difficulty that I feel can and should be eliminated in the aging process is societal prejudice toward the elderly population. Reagan and others like hime of prominent status have the potential to alter some of these views. Unfortunately, on the opposing side, television sitcoms often portray the elderly, especially male senior figures, as being incompetent, incapable, and lazy. They are portrayed in this bad light for humor’s sake, but I wonder how these television shows will affect the way the youngest, most impressionable viewers regard the elderly in the future. Children do not differentiate between middle age and old age. To them, everyone as old as their parents is in old age. Hopefully, proper education, parental guidance, and other role models, as exemplary as Ronald Reagan, will have a balancing effect.

Actually, I meant “Ronald Reagan and Bob Hope” to mean “very, very old people”. The baby boom generation, for the last fifty years or so, has really defined American culture. In the late 1960s, the boomers were in their twenties, and therefore anyone over 30 was “old”.

Now that the oldest of the boomers are in their late fifties, though, the terms are being redefined. Now, while people older than the boomers are still “old”, worn out, and useless, people younger than the boomers — people who would have been considered adults or even “old” thirty years ago — are also useless because they don’t have as much life experience as the boomers.