Life Imitates Art: The way we treat the elderly

Some Guy in DC and I (La Femme Nikita) were talking last night about the absoludicrousness of some of the budget cuts Some Guy posted about yesterday, specifically that these cuts fleece the poor and elderly by raising their Medicare and Medicaid co-payments.

I'm not sure if y'all are pop-culture junkies, or if you remember a television show on in the early '90's called Dinosaurs? One of the episodes, called "Hurling Day," had the main character Earl all excited because his mother-in-law was turning 72, and on that 72nd birthday, all elderly people were thrown into the tar pit.

Then, there's Samuel Beckett's "Endgame", in which one of the two main characters' parents spend their time on stage in trash bins, eventually dying in the bins, and their deaths are barely noticed.

We can laugh at the absurdity of Beckett or the humor of Jim Henson's puppetry, but at the end of the day, are we treating our elderly any differently?