The Moral Decline Of America's Elderly

AT THE SENIOR CENTER, small southern town, there's always something. I don't think I belong; I'm only sixty one, and should maybe come back in about ten years, when the current crop is mostly dead. Either that or move to Princeton, New Jersey. So anyway, in I walk and sit down close to an eighty five year old male blue collar country christian conservative. Too close, which means at the same table, in the same room, in the same country. I begin listening to the usual hillbilly gospel music, a cultural norm. I dream of better days, and string quartets. A friend walks past, and shows me the ketchup stain on his shirt. I suggest bleach. Moments later, I hear the eighty five year old country Christian mutter "bleach won't touch that stain." But he isn't talking to me. He's looking in another direction, speaking to the thin air, or perhaps an invisible companion. So I keep listening to the banjo and jug duo, and dreaming. Then I hear him again. "College educated people, think they're so smart, don't know nothing practical." Again, he isn't talking to me. But this time of year I have a short fuse, and I have already had enough. So I look off into the distance, away from the old man, and audibly mutter to nobody: "uneducated people are always jealous and resentful of educated people." A moment later, I glance at him, and sure enough, he's glaring straight at me, his eyes dimmed by age and early senility, but intense with hatred. I stare right back. Then, looking straight at him, I say: "I have a PhD." Without missing a beat, he shoots right back: "that don't mean nothing to me." Still not finished, looking for more, ready to fight, I respond: "I understand. None of your achievements, whatever they might be, mean anything to me either." I wanted to go outside and finish it, but it ended there. Today's senior citizens were teenagers during the prosperous teen aged decade of the nineteen fifties. These are not the strong, straight-forward elderly of my youth, the eighteen nineties born World War One generation. Nor are they the World War Two generation of my parents. No, these are are the nation's spoiled elderly, who came of age in America's most prosperous, self assured, arrogant, and self absorbed epoch, post World War Two, the sneering Elvis Presley nineteen fifties. The "greatest generation", that of my parents, is now almost all dead, and I mourn their passing. They just don't make old people the way they used to..................CREATIVE WRITING, CULTURAL ANALYSIS. THANKS!