Every ambulance call I get for elderly people fills me with a growing sense of dread at the aging process. I don't see the many venerable people who have rich, independent lives; all the older folk I encounter are in their most desperate and helpless moments. They are often confused, in pain, or simply out of touch. Occasionally they are dying, whether they are aware of it or not. Usually I pick them up at facilities that strike me as good reasons to have children and thus possess the chance of having someone to look after me in my old age.

I recently had a birthday, an event that I fail to connect emotionally with aging. Birthdays are not, for me, opportunities to reflect on one's slow transformation from mewling child to wizened oldster. They are opportunities to receive presents. At twenty-nine, I find myself beset by people who are determined to make age a form of personality classification, sort of a generational Myers-Briggs Type Inventory test. Why anyone would want to trumpet their membership in an artificial age cohort (Gen X, Gen Y) and thus subsume a portion of their identity to a stereotype is completely beyond me. These classifications exist because it is easier for us to ascribe individuals' opinions to their membership in characteristic groups than it is to listen to them as individuals. They persist because the people who want to sell you shampoo, politics, and television networks have embraced them as marketing strategies.

Similarly, when I read the "letters to the editor" of most publications, I find a plethora of messages that begin "As a [socially constructed subgroup for whom the writer presumes to speak], I [have an opinion which is made more authoritative by my membership in this group]." As an individual, I find it astonishing that people would willingly marginalize their opinions this way. As a twenty-nine year-old, perhaps I simply lack the wisdom to accept that such classifications serve a useful function. But as an open minded person, I tend to believe that a good idea is still valid when put forth by a stupid person. As a cynical bastard, I think membership in a marketing category does not automatically verify one's opinions.

Unfortunately, and fortunately, stereotypes are an extremely useful means of understanding the world. When I drive up to the rescue squad, I tend to operate on the assumption that other drivers around me will behave in a generally predictable manner. These stereotypes are based on assimilation of my experience that in roughly 80% of all Washington DC traffic situations, other drivers will obey laws and not do anything wantonly destructive. When I see a red light ahead, I stop, assuming that the person behind me will not plow into the back of my car. This can be a dangerous assumption in DC, but it's the best and most functional one I have developed.

I once bought a magazine called Worlds of Wonder, a quasi-scientific publication for British lads and laddettes that was published early in this century. It reads like one of those 1950's school films in which a hapless housewife discovers just how many items in her kitchen have tin in them. ("Indeed, a world without tin would be a world without many modern conveniences.") Worlds of Wonder features such gems as an illustration of "what a cricket match would look like if there was no friction." To me, it looked much more entertaining than a real cricket match, but the article made its point.

So consider what the world would be like if we humans had no ability to extract general principles about the world from our experiences. What if you never learned that people who knock on your door and proffer religious literature are probably people you want to avoid? What if you never grasped, despite repeated painful experiences, that picking up glowing charcoal briquettes to examine their beauty was an unwise thing to do? What if you could never operate on the assumption that there wasn't a small snake coiled in your shoe in the morning, although you never actually found the little critter in there? Indeed, a world without stereotypes would be a world in which we were all helpless, complete morons.

Then there are the kinds of stereotypes that cause well-meaning liberal folk of DC to grasp their valuables a little more closely as they pass an African-American on the sidewalk. Or, quite simply, from walking a few blocks into a neighborhood where they might meet someone from a different racial or ethnic background -- someone who might change their assumptions. How are we supposed to extract the ugly little time bombs of these stereotypes without also dismantling the machinery of other, more productive ones?

Consider old people. I am forming a skewed view that being old is a terrifying, helpless experience in which one repeatedly falls and is picked up by ambulances staffed with young people who are quietly horrified by one's predicament. It is a time in which one loses one's mind, and ultimately, one's life. So when I see them on the sidewalk of my life, I grip the handbag of my youth more closely to my side.