I was watching Henry Rollins's "spoken word" thing on IFC and he had an aside about how he always respected the elderly because they " had had their hearts broken more than you, were smarter than you, and most of their friends were dead".

Maybe I'm just hanging around with all the wrong elderly people, but they don't seem to be any more or less intelligent as a group than anyone else. Actually, in my experience, the elderly often seem to be out of touch with minor events of the past 50-60 years such as desegregation and the iPod.

As for their broken hearts and dead friends, that's just life. I don't really see how "not dying for a long time" immediately marks one as worthy of respect. It seems to me that there ought to be something extraordinary about your character if you are to be respected. Based on the number of Baby Boomers retiring now (whose social security benefits I get to pay for), it's obvious that there's nothing extraordinary any more about being old.