Ruby, my sincere sympathies are with you, believe me! Growing older is not for sissies, as we all eventually must find out. Eventually, the fittest , healthiest, most robust and enthusiastic younger person MUST follow in the footsteps you leave in the dust of passing time.
Genetics, of course, is the joker in the deck, since the single most important asset any of us can hope to have is excellent genetics...and yet what one inherits is almost entirely a matter of pure chance. Those who hew to eugenics would have us believe that rigid, selective breeding is the only intelligent way to control this random dynamic. Unfortunately, although no one can predict what future imperatives force upon us (like it or not), eugentic theories typically either run contrary to the dictates of most religions that center a solitary 'Supreme Being' (and are therefore not a satisfactory answer for the plight of those among us with flawed DNA, to one degree or another) OR have been repeatedly twisted and used for malevolent ends.
The more immediate and tragic offshoot of inevitable aging is that younger people (who have yet to go a significant way in life before they too start to crumble), are both unmindful and unsympathetic to this universal dynamic. of human life.
Previous world-wide cultures generally maintained a certain regard for the erstwhile 'wisdom and experience' that age brings on and held the elderly in suitable regard. In today's soporific American capitalist culture, aging has now been almost entirely disregarded as irrelevant by the corporate/political puppet-masters who pull our strings for profit and/or materialist gain.
Under such a crassly philistine system as ours, the elderly can expect no mercy whatsoever (unless it comes from younger people who hail from culturally traditional societies, such as those with a Confucian heritage)...and even then, as the American capitalist model continues to transmogrify individuals into a faceless mass of mentally anaesthetised consumers around the world, even that effect is being exponentially diminished.
More simply stated, growing older in America has become an unpleasant ordeal that few (who are still young) can either empathise with or relate to. Writer/author and acute social observer Christopher Rufo addresses this insidious process in his recently released book, 'America's Cultural Revolution: How the Left Conquered Everything' (ISBN-10 0063227533), which I heartily recommend to everyone. At least it explains a lot of this seething frustration we older people feel over our plight!
Meanwhile, what to do about the deleterious effects of aging? Probably the best advice is to study the classical Greek texts of the ancient Stoic philosophers and either bite down on the black pill...or swallow the yellow one and live each day as if it were the last. One never knows when it actually WILL BE...
