Age discrimination in the marketplace is alive and well. In fact, the phenomena of silent age discrimination is in better health now than ever before. At least, up to five years ago, we could count on our newly turned sixty plus year olds being tossed into the 'useless humans' scrap heap. Since we were conditioned to accept that as a normal passage of life, in my generation, we said, "O.K. That takes us close to our retirement years -- sixty-two. We are ready to go." Our generation was satisfied to take our predetermined, allowable forty years to carve out our careers and our fortunes that would tide us over into our "old age". Now, however, our human wastepile includes most men over forty-five and all women over forty; they have been forced out of the labor market, one way or another, in the prime of their lives and cheated out of twenty years of their estate building time. What are they to do?

What's even more scarry is: What can the next generation expect from the 'American Dream'? By the time they get into the labor market, there might be a fifteen year ceiling to realize their dreams. We have all heard of the "American Dream' fulfilling its promise in some people's lives, haven't we? But fulfilling some people's dreams is not good enough! The gold ring has to be available to everyone, without them having to push a stacked deck out of their way once they have reached a predetermined 'useless age'.

I am really not against a youth orientated society -- heck, we have a few of them in our own family. But what has the youth of America got over the talents of our older citizens? Why, of course, primarily youth, along with naivete' in the marketplace, a fresh approach to 'making it' and a willingness to exploit and be exploited; they lend themselves, as a whole, to the less than honorable scruples of their employers and, without unity, they perform like robots, which was not so with their previous generation. Besides all of those qualities, they possess the most important attribute of all --- they work cheaper and conform better than their predessessors.

That phenomena, in employer circles, is known as 'natural attrition'. It's an old-fangled phrase that gives new meaning to, 'out with the near-old and in with the new-young'. Only now, in our day and age (whoops, pardon the pun), near-old means a talented, savvy, pre-mid life human as opposed to the new-youth raw, green behind the ears, willing to accept anything, robotic human. We are in a generation gap of mightiest proportions, a gap which the labor market and the advertizing industry fully perpetuates and utilizes, causing the younger population to expouse values of immense, materialistic expectations. (Ah, but methinks that's a discussion for another Point of View® article, in another Presspoints Netnews© issue.)

While our government constantly tells us that there are hundreds of thousands of new jobs out there that go begging, waiting for people to come around and scoop them up, they have neglected to tell us that they are worthless jobs, when one considers our inflationary times. They are jobs which either pay minimum wage, lower than minimum wage, below a blue-collar's wage scale and under ceiling technical's wage scale. This is especially true for women and 'elder' citizens, who have been ousted from their jobs, by attrition, and forced into a substandard labor market. (Elder, in our scenario, has a new meaning; anyone over forty years of age.)

This all translates into readjusting one's standard of living, that same hard fought for standard of living that our 'elders' had to sweat their blood to establish. It means abandoning the 'American Dream', it means giving up the promise that we had set our expect- ations onto and it means letting go of the coattails of prosperity that was due us, as citizens of our country, if we worked hard and diligently.

Times have certainly changed.