America’s civic life is a mess in part because every issue becomes an argument, people locking themselves into fixed positions and hating the other side. From leash laws to health care to airport security to caring for the aging, we seem paralyzed, and that is a problem for other websites, but I’ve written this week about my evolving feelings on our culture of fear and hysteria, on health care hysterias and also on the patronizing treatment of the aging, who are offered coupons and discounts in Box Stores and hardware stories and movie chains.

Of course, this has upset some people who believe strongly in preventative health care and its result medicating and testing, and also that “seniors” are needy and deserve and demand their discounts and coupons. It’s good and health to provoke discussions. This is not a political site, and I am not a political person, but I do share my life and my attitudes about health and aging are evolving, and that is a good thing to be writing about. One woman e-mailed me in outrage yesterday, saying I was her “happy medicine” and she didn’t want to read about real life on my website. So long, I said. I told her I hoped she found her happy medicine elsewhere. Sadly, the world isn’t just about cute dogs.

These are just my opinions. Yours are just as good, or better. My feelings are not, in my mind, a debate, just my feelings.

I am not rich, but I am not needy, and I don’t want discounts and coupons because I am over 55. I’d rather those discounts go to people who are needy, whether they are older or younger. And I don’t like the assumption that because I am older, I need to be treated like a fragile rescue dog and pitied and given special consideration. I may get there, but I’m not there. And it will be up to me when and if I get there.

What is compassion, anyway? If we want to help the elderly, how about providing them with sane and humane health care? Maybe not booting them out of work they love and can do because they’re not young? Helping them stay in their homes when they get foreclosed by banks that sold them on near-fraudulent mortgages? Maybe rethinking the warehousing of people for decades in nursing homes and other facilities, far from their families and lives, because they can’t afford to be home. Giving older people real choices about life, that might be nice.

I don’t need get 10 per cent off at my movie chain (which sells popcorn for $6 a small bucket), or 6 per cent off of fire starters at a hardware store. That isn’t helping the needy, or making aging easier or more productive. I want to define myself, rather than have a store clerk do it.

And the idea that these little tidbits and pieces of cheese are actually helping the elderly is insane. It’s like Customer Service and Tech Support. Corporations understand that they don’t actually have to be supportive or offer service, they just have to pretend. Your call is important to us. Just stay on the line for three hours. An “elderly” neighbor – she is 81 – called me in a panic last week because she couldn’t figure out her cellphone, which here kids have given her so she could call for help if she needed to, wasn’t working, and she had been trying for a day to reach a human being at the company because she couldn’t hear the computer voice. She had been overseas and back several times, and was now trapped in a phone tree. I rushed over.

They wouldn’t talk to me because the phone wasn’t registered to me, and we went back and forth until she came to my house and was on an extension of my house phone. Two supervisors, and three continents later, I think we got it sorted out, but I’m not sure. Gladys said she is thinking of moving to China. Gladys said she would happily give up her six per cent discount at the hardware store and talk to a human being about her communications issues. That would be helping the elderly, rather than spouting hypocritical gas about it, or distributing coupons and discounts many people do not actually need.