If it hollers, neglect it. Keep it in confinement with meager living conditions. Separate it from friends and family, where it will rest in solitude. Onlookers will peer into the scanty isolation unit which bears the creature and drown in pity -- the zoo, the abode in which it lives, understaffed, underfunded, and under-loved.

If it hollers, mock it. Abuse it with insults. The ignorant thing cannot understand you anyway. It speaks a foreign language in grunts and moans, bizarre to the ears of healthy men. Its mind has drifted into a savage wilderness.

If it hollers, let it go. The creature no longer serves a purpose. Bless it with a mercy killing. After all, it has been cursed with life for too long.

Think I referred to animals in the above paragraphs? Try how our society treats elders.

As a child, I read I’ll Love You Forever by Robert Munsch before I crumpled into my cloud of covers at night. At the beginning of the narrative, a mother cradles her child in her arms and softly whispers, “I'll love you forever. I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be.” The poor mother struggles with her young boy as he rips the house to shreds and refuses to plunge into a bath. Nevertheless, she holds him every night and asserts her undying love for him.

Then the roles reverse.

The son emerges as a middle-aged adult and his mother succumbs to illness in her old age. Her son embraces the elderly mother and whispers, “I’ll love you forever. I’ll like you for always.”

Our culture tends to forget about the last half of the story. Certainly, parents care for the children, but who cares for the parents? Our youth-centric nation tends to diminish the value of a person as their age escalates. Through wrinkle cream commercials and songs such as “We are Young,” we neglect those with the most wisdom.

I witnessed this disregard when my youth group played board games with nursing home residents. Toothy grins greeted us in the stale-scented air of the dwelling. A certain golden glow illuminated their cheeks when they spotted us. They told stories from decades before my parents were conceived. Their eyes glittered with a wisdom I had never beheld before.

A man with veiny, shaky hands plopped a game of Scrabble onto the table. All of the students in my youth group suffered a vicious defeat in that game.

The game concluded and the residents returned to their rooms. Our youth leader beamed at us, but he had no reason to. Why did an hour of brutal losses in word games deserve a smile?

“They don’t receive a lot of visitors,” he explained. “Some haven’t had a family member visit or call in months.”

Months? The longest I had been away from home at that point was two weeks. I could not imagine a month without my mother’s smile, my father’s unbearable jokes.

When my parents reached the age of 80 or 90, did I expect them to do the same? Will my mother spend half a year without encouragement from her children? Will my father go months without hearing his daughter say, “I’ll love you forever; I’ll like you for always?”

If it hollers, listen.