The Elderly Old People - 1483 Words

The elderly. Old people. Senior citizens. These are all three different ways to represent one group of human beings. A younger, more naive version of myself would have viewed these people as grumpy, sedentary, helpless, or narrow-minded. The list goes on. It may come across that I have something against old folk, but I do not; that is not the point. The point is that I was generalizing an entire group of people based on preconceptions were psychologically embedded in me from fifteen years’ worth of external influences. However, my experiences with Mr. Nathan Glasser, who was a resident at Meadow Lakes Senior Center, opened my eyes to the role of stereotypes and their effects on a human being. This ingrained discrimination against the†¦show more content†¦Some of these preconceptions about the elderly come from what America values: youth, beauty, and vitality. In this society, the old folk do not seem to fit any of these categories, so people consider them to be unheal thy in order to put a larger distance between themselves and ageing. The creation of this distance separates oneself from death in a sense. For me, this discrimination against the elderly arises mainly from the fear that I will somehow do something wrong and cause the old man or woman to become furious. I was also very paranoid that the senior citizen would require serious medical attention, and I would not be able to get it in time. These people seem so helpless, and I can only do so much. However, I wasn’t alone in my views on the elderly; research shows that age discrimination has been steadily increasing since the 1990s due to the rise of the media. I had only just begun to volunteer at Meadow Lakes, and I was already forced to have one-on-one interaction with old people. How was I supposed to act in front of them? The only elderly people that I associate with are my grandparents, so how would I ever converse with someone I barely knew? This wasn’t like making friends at school; it was basically Greek to me. Even worse, the woman who worked here, Erin, let me off with a warning about Mr. Glasser before I even entered the room. She explained that he was very