For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress
With all its ingenuity and affluence, the U.S. has somehow contrived to make a mockery of that assertion of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on behalf of the elderly. Victims of a society that has prolonged life but shortened its usefulness, they sit playing chess, feeding birds or nodding in the sun in geriatric ghettos from San Diego to St. Petersburg. If less well off, they huddle in threadbare apartments in central cities, eking out a meager existence on Social Security, daring the sidewalks only when necessity overrides fear...