Morning thoughts:
Boot camps for the elderly.
Pros/cons:
- Would give them something to do all day / Would quickly and greatly diminish the income stream of HMO's etc.
- Would select for fitness in observable ways that could then be applied to progeny if any, enabling benign eugenic matchmaking programs etc. / Would create controversy and petulant disunity among the superstitious and bleeding-heart minorities.
- Would help build and confirm a national spirit of endurance and toughness, the walk as opposed to the talk / Might tip the balance toward dystopic cynicism before Triumph-of-the-Will kicks in
- Reality videos of actual boot-camp discipline scenes and terminal failures would be instructive for all age groups, and vicariously cathartic for the young and middle-aged fit / Would at least temporarily create bands of the outlaw old resistant to the idea - possibly violently, leading to increase in social chaos
- Would elevate Darwinian fact above the fictions of caritas and compassion / Might produce a super-predator reaction in the young once they understand that's what's ahead for them
- Would dramatically increase the desire and subsequent funding for "fountain of youth" type medical research, possibly leading to physical "immortality" / Would generate massive demand for cosmetic camouflage of aging process, requiring additional layers of bureaucracy devoted to identification and verification of true "elders"
- CCTV feeds would be amusing generally and effective distraction from increasingly bad news / Would increase the need for dissociation and dis-identification in relatives of the interned
- Would enable, once the public was accommodated to the overall concept, the creation of Elder-Corps military troops - fierce, motivated, determined, merciless - whose disposability would be unquestioned / Could backfire due to mostly accurate feelings of being unloved and unwanted, creating an independent force with no loyalty to the status quo
