AXE GRINDING

I am sick and tired of the demeaning commercials that run constantly on TV displaying older people as stupid, demented cripples with false teeth, pissing their pants, needing catheters, unable to comprehend technology, riding in motorized chairs, needing Viagra and ready to buy into schemes like reverse mortgages. 

 I have no problem with advertising the prows and cons of a product for people with specific needs; but the present selection of actors and the way these ads are presented to the general public I find objectionable.   

I feel that these ad agencies are probably staffed by thirty-something young people that actually view older people as pabulum eating, incompetent, regressing relics sliding into dementia – and that’s the way they present them on TV. 

I despise the commercial with the older woman in her hover-chair riding around in circles in her kitchen, waving her hand in the air and appearing to holler ‘wee wee wee!’ like the pig on the GEICO commercial.

I am seventy-two.   I retired from the military at forty-two.  I received my Bachelor Degree at forty-six and my Masters at fifty.  I spent eleven years teaching in the Indian and Eskimo villages of Alaska – retiring at sixty-seven.    I am married to a young woman and have great sex (without Viagra.)  I made my first solo parachute jump at seventy and plan to jump again this summer.  I ride a motorcycle in the summer, and in the winter I heat my house with firewood.  I work out at the gym twice a week and bowl twice a week – and, I am not unusual.

I hope that if the time comes that I require special products for age disability I can deal with a company that will approach me an intelligent adult. 

The Ol’Buzzard