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Sunday, January 18. 2009
Old in America
Is this strange? An elderly couple on a Pacific Ocean cruise ship put a “Do Not Disturb” hanger on the door and were never seen or heard from again. Just a few weeks ago a reporter was missing, presumed to have gone overboard of her own volition, in the Caribbean Sea. Is this the new mode of suicide? Take a cruise and jump?Hard to imagine dying peacefully as your lungs burst trying to suck in oxygen and all they get is salt water. The salt water alone would make me gag. I’ve been snorkeling enough to know that. Salt water is nasty!
No, drowning is not a way I’d choose to end it all. “Suicide is painless,” the guy sang in the movie M*A*S*H and that’s pretty much how I would like my life to end: painlessly, with a smile. I've fantasized my most pleasurable last moment here in this blog, but, in all fairness to the woman in the fantasy, it wouldn’t be a good experience for her, no matter how twisted she may be. So, a nice, peaceful departure from this Mortal Coil for me.
But when I’m really effin’ old.
It isn’t hard to understand why the elderly couple decided to make theirs a suicide pact. Getting old isn’t easy and at some point you just want to stop all the pain, the frustration, the embarrassment and the occasional humiliation. In this country, we do not care or love our elderly. Not collectively anyway.
With all the physical and health issues I’m contending with, it’s actually easy to see why they would choose to slip into the cold waters off the California coast.
Social Security, if you can get it, is a joke. It was first created so the elderly could have a living income, but since then, it has turned into a poverty subsistence stipend. The government wants us to get excited because they have this great drug plan and the pharmeceutical companies think they are helping out by making the cost lower for the elderly and poor, but if we as a nation really cared, there would be no cost for those medications. Or for medical care for that matter.
But not in America. If you’re poor and elderly and can’t afford good health care, then fuck you! Die and get the fuck out of the way!
Yeah, at Denny’s you can order from the seniors menu, but why not give the seniors a 20% discount from the entire menu? I see people, some just 10-15 years older than me, ordering from the seniors menu — and not just at Denny’s — with water, because they can’t afford to order coffee, tea or a nice refreshing Diet Coke.
From the rhetoric, Barack Obama will start to bring a change to this national embarrassment, but it can’t depend on one man, even if he is the President of the United States. It would be a good bet that we all think: “If that old person taking too long to get on the bus ain’t my loved one, then screw him (or her)!” for most of us, the elderly are an impediment to getting whatever it is we want, be at the cash register waiting to check out at the gas station, or maybe it’s a parent or grandparent who still can’t figure out how to use the VCR you bought them for Christmas 12 years ago.
During the Reagan years we read and heard about elderly people, in the richest nation on Earth, having to eat pet food. Just for the Hell of it once, when I was staying with a friend who had a really sweet cat, I tried to eat some of her canned food. I gagged. Luckily for me, my friend had plenty of human food available so I wasn't going to starve, but I wanted to see if I could do it, if the unthinkable ever occured.
We can endure much and we can do whatever it takes to survive, it's in our DNA, but as humans the loss of our dignity is probably the worst cut of all. When the indignities are hastened by, or the result of others, the humiliation is unforgiving.
My brothers and sisters, there are six remaining, are the kindest and most generous people I know — from personal experience. I marvel at their capacity for not only tolerance, but acceptance. You won’t see any of them get impatient waiting for someone who is struggling or having a hard time. More than likely, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and help. I should be so thoughtful.
There are many others like that across America; we see and read about it everyday, if you take the time to dig into the local section of your newspaper, be it online or in print, but that is now becoming the exception, rather than the rule.
I have to say though, this past week I have witnessed several acts of kindness on the bus; young people getting up, without being asked, to give their seats to elderly passengers.
One of the more common stories we read and hear about the elderly is the abuse they receive, often from their own family members. Outside the family, elderly people are an easy target for every type of predator.
The worst of it though is their country — their government — has pretty much turned its back on the elderly. My jaw drops when I hear a politician — and it’s always a Republican — who implies, or even says, programs like Social Security and Medicaire are too generous. In the debate over the bailout for the Big Three automakers, one of the items the Republicans opposing the plan demanded was that the automakers and the unions abrogate the pensions of the retired and the Republicans did say that the pensions and benefits of these elderly, retired, auto workers were too generous. Huh?
The elderly shouldn’t have a retirement package that allows them to live comfortably with relatively good health care? I sometimes wonder if these assholes have any idea what they’re saying about the average workers and retired people in this nation. For the Republican politicians, it’s all about scoring political points with their base.One of the tactics they use so often is to set the union workers and retirees against the non-union workers and retirees, saying the unions folks should be diminished to the level of the non-union folks. Hey, I got a better idea: How about we raise the standard of living and the quality of life for non-union workers to that of the card-carrying workers!
Our collective attitude about the elderly needs to change. One of the benefits of having a president who was once a community organizer is that he knows what to takes to change a neighborhood and a city. His days in the trenches of daily living gives Barack Obama not only a unique perspective on the values (or lack thereof) of our nation, it gives him domestic experience far beyond that of any
of his predecessors.
President-Elect Obama has already improved the quality of life on the Southside of Chicago. Let’s see what he can do as president.
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