"Old age is hell," my dear mother used to tell me far too often. Well, now I am old, and she was right. I can't complain too much about myself; I'm more fortunate than most. But for much of the elderly in this crumbling country, existence is a nightmare. Someone once said a society is measured by how it treats its elderly. Let's look at that.

A century ago, there were virtually no nursing homes. And there certainly weren't retirement homes and retirement communities, which serve as kind of a de facto apartheid system for oldsters that aren't attractive or healthy enough to be wanted in polite society any longer. Now, the establishment counter to this is that people didn't live as long back then. You didn't have this huge population of senior citizens. There are more people now, so there would naturally be more old people. But life expectancy has been falling in America for the last several years, despite all the propaganda to the contrary. The primary reason life expectancy started increasing during the twentieth century is because all those terrible childhood diseases- the array of deadly fevers and coughs- were eradicated. The sudden introduction of cancer somewhat cancelled that out. But you always had people living to ripe old ages.

So without nursing homes, without "elder care" or hospice, without those wildly expensive retirement communities, where did the surviving oldsters live back then? Watch reruns of the 1970s show The Waltons. That's how it was for many families. Grandma and/or Grandpa stayed with one of their adult kids. Remember, until the 1930s there was no Social Security. Few women worked outside the home, and until the 1950s, most workers weren't paid a pension that might help support their widows after their deaths. The family was the most important thing in most people's lives back then. That's hard to imagine now, in this decadent and narcissistic time. It was the most natural thing in the world to take your elderly parents into your home. To not only provide them with shelter, but to value them as the magnificent assets they represent. They are not only our blood heritage, but living links to a vanished past.

I don't know that Americans ever quite valued elders the way other cultures have, and in fact still do. In all Asian cultures, the most elderly citizens are celebrated and revered. Multigenerational families are the norm. You're not likely to find a Korean grandmother or a Japanese grandfather shuttled off to some dirty and impersonal American-style nursing home, where they will be lackadaisically "cared for," at great financial cost. In many cases they will be abused, and rarely if ever visited by their children or grandchildren. You'll find the same respect for the elderly in Middle Eastern cultures, and in Africa. Really, the only societies that no longer treat their elderly with proper respect are the western ones. The ones that are still majority White. White adult children have been receptive to the poisonous conditioning; your parents are stupid, and smelly, and sickly, and ask too many questions. They cramp your style. Put them away where we don't have to see them. Put yourself first!