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Case closed. If all possible examples were catalogued they would no longer seem exceptional. Finally, it is condescending to express amazement when older people go on living life. The oldtimers themselves are mostly amazed that their vitality seems to surprise their juniors. It is fair to assume, in the end, that the reactions of the young to the presence of the aged include a good deal of buried awe and even fear. Aging remains, after all, mysterious, its processes far from clearly understood by science. Research has pinned down some things about aging, however. One thing that the helpless senility that is part of the common stereotype of the aged is not common at all in real life. In fact, not more than 8% of old people suffer from it.
It is ignorance of that truth, among others, that sets the stage for ageism, that patchwork of prejudices and predispositions. This ism, like others, is likely to be ameliorated only by the outcry of reality. It will not be banished by edict. It will remain for individuals to prove, by the sheer living of life, that habitual beliefs about the meaning of age are often at variance with the truths of the heart.
—Frank Trippett