The Problem With Age
Forget racial and religious problems, in my opinion the biggest type of discrimination in every day life is that of age discrimination. Arguably this could actually be worse than the other higher profile types of discrimination. What makes this possibly worse is the fact that age is a field where everyone is equal. As long as they live, everyone will go through the same stages of ageing equally at the same rate. Sure, some people will be more affected by it than others but none the less everyone is as much under its control as the rest of humanity.
So, if everyone is equal when it comes to age then how can there be discrimination? This is because while everyone is equal in terms of the rate at which they age, everyone is also unequal in terms of how far along the path of aging they are. For example, common sense would dictate that young children be treated with more respect for two reasons; the first one being that they are vital to survival of the man kind, but also because everyone, no matter how old they are, has gone through that stage in their life and should be understanding towards children. Unfortunately, this isn't the case, it would seem the older you are, the more you forget about your life as a child. The more arrogance you have at being older than other people, despite the key factor in this being something you have absolutely no control in. The time of your birth.
Something else I've noticed about age is that, even though every single person on the planet pretty much experiences ageing in the same way, there are some incredible stereotyping when it comes to a persons age. There are stereotypes about pretty much every age group; teenagers, middle-aged adults and elderly people to name but a few. These can be almost everywhere in every day life from advertising to books. What else is weird about this is how everyone seems to find this o.k. and almost no one challenges this despite the fact it gets extremely boring after a while. How almost every story has very similar characters due to stereotyping. In Atwood's "The Handmaids Tale" the characters seem to be split between young and old to a certain extent. With the older characters such as the Commander and his wife and Aunt Lydia being the more wise and cynical characters and the younger ones such as Offred and the other Handmaids being slightly more out of control. Even though the age difference between all of them can 't possibly be a huge amount.
Something else I've noticed about age is that, even though every single person on the planet pretty much experiences ageing in the same way, there are some incredible stereotyping when it comes to a persons age. There are stereotypes about pretty much every age group; teenagers, middle-aged adults and elderly people to name but a few. These can be almost everywhere in every day life from advertising to books. What else is weird about this is how everyone seems to find this o.k. and almost no one challenges this despite the fact it gets extremely boring after a while. How almost every story has very similar characters due to stereotyping. In Atwood's "The Handmaids Tale" the characters seem to be split between young and old to a certain extent. With the older characters such as the Commander and his wife and Aunt Lydia being the more wise and cynical characters and the younger ones such as Offred and the other Handmaids being slightly more out of control. Even though the age difference between all of them can 't possibly be a huge amount.
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