Historically speaking the aged in the United States have largely suffered through what may be characterized as a Dark Age. As Michael Harrington characterized it in 1969,America tends to make its people miserable when they become old. [They are] plagued by ill health; they do not have enough money; they are socially isolated. (p. 32) Richard Margolis (1990) suggests that we have given into a heavy fatalism that recalls Seneca’s dismissal of old age as ‘an incurable disease.’ We see feebleness, helplessness, mindlessness. The evidence...is all around us. (p.112) There is a habit of seeing a population of frail elders, locked within their homes, as rather passive and as prisoners of their illnesses. (Rubinstein, Kilbride, & Nagy, 1992, x) As Margaret Gullette (1997), proposes, our history is such that we treat longevity as solely a disaster. (Perhaps men should congratulate themselves on dying younger!). (p. 186) And as the Gray Panthers’ television monitoring task force concluded in the late 1970s, older people were typically depicted as ugly, toothless, sexless, incontinent, senile, confused and helpless... This Dark Age condition has been intensified by certain dominant values in American culture. Two of these bear special attention. First the
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