I was at a small-town grocery store today, and the cashier was an older lady named "Wilma".

Anyhow, I know she's worked there for a couple months at least. Nevertheless, she was still incompetent to successfully execute a pretty basic, common procedure on the register today. If it had been her first day or first week, it would have been expected.

I felt bad for her, because obviously she's having difficulty learning the computer-based cash register. Old dogs and new tricks and all that.

But the philosopher in me spoke up: She shouldn't have to suffer the degradation of working a college student's job (cashier) in her autumn years. Her husband should be supporting her with his pension and/or life savings, and her (Catholic/natural number of) children should be filling in any voids.

And if she needed a job for some reason, isn't there anything she could do more competently, leaning on the 6 decades of life experience she has?

And if money weren't the issue, she should be too busy with her 10 - 40 grandchildren to be "bored" and need to get a worthless cashier job in order to have "something to do" to keep from going mad.

Even if she were a widow, it's still a shame that she has to be reduced to a fish-out-of-water situation like her current one. She should have still with teaching, children, accounting, or SOMETHING she's been practicing during the first 65 years of her life.

IN CONCLUSION:

Considering the honor and respect that should be given to the aged, and what I have observed on more than one occasion, one or more of these things is extremely messed up:

A) The economy, which fails to give working men a rightful pension after 50 years of hard work and employment, plus it fails to give men a living wage.
B) The economy, which makes it difficult for old people to survive on their government-run pension, "Social Security" due to things like inflation (devaluation of the Dollar), etc.
C) The Baby Boomer culture which told her to only have 3 or 4 children
D) The messed up "global economy" which encourages/forces so many young adults to move across the country in search of decently-paying jobs, causing their parents to never see whole groups of their grandchildren. Plus a young couple could help their parents in certain ways LOCALLY that they couldn't do in a remote manner. For example, you could bring over a loaf of homemade bread (cost: 0.60) but shipping that same loaf would be prohibitively expensive. A young couple could actually throw away a good dryer, while one of their parents called and complained, "my dryer broke and I could really use one." But shipping a dryer across the country would be prohibitively expensive.
E) The economy, which keeps everyone poor, so young people can barely pay their own debts and bills, and have nothing left over to help support their parents financially.