“Old age is hell,” my dear mother used to tell me far too often. Well, now I am old, and she was right. I can’t complain too much about myself; I’m more fortunate than most. But for much of the elderly in this crumbling country, existence is a nightmare. Someone once said a society is measured by how it treats its elderly. Let’s look at that.
A century ago, there were virtually no nursing homes. And there certainly weren’t retirement homes and retirement communities, which serve as kind of a de facto apartheid system for oldsters that aren’t attractive or healthy enough to be wanted in polite society any longer. Now, the establishment counter to this is that people didn’t live as long back then. You didn’t have this huge population of senior citizens. There are more people now, so there would naturally be more old people. But life expectancy has been falling in America for the last several years, despite all the propaganda to the contrary. The primary reason life expectancy started increasing during the twentieth century is because all those terrible childhood diseases- the array of deadly fevers and coughs- were eradicated. The sudden introduction of cancer somewhat cancelled that out. But you always had people living to ripe old ages.
So without nursing homes, without “elder care” or hospice, without those wildly expensive retirement communities, where did the surviving oldsters live back then? Watch reruns of the 1970s show The Waltons. That’s how it was for many families. Grandma and/or Grandpa stayed with one of their adult kids. Remember, until the 1930s there was no Social Security. Few women worked outside the home, and until the 1950s, most workers weren’t paid a pension that might help support their widows after their deaths. The family was the most important thing in most people’s lives back then. That’s hard to imagine now, in this decadent and narcissistic time. It was the most natural thing in the world to take your elderly parents into your home. To not only provide them with shelter, but to value them as the magnificent assets they represent. They are not only our blood heritage, but living links to a vanished past.
I don’t know that Americans ever quite valued elders the way other cultures have, and in fact still do. In all Asian cultures, the most elderly citizens are celebrated and revered. Multigenerational families are the norm. You’re not likely to find a Korean grandmother or a Japanese grandfather shuttled off to some dirty and impersonal American-style nursing home, where they will be lackadaisically “cared for,” at great financial cost. In many cases they will be abused, and rarely if ever visited by their children or grandchildren. You’ll find the same respect for the elderly in Middle Eastern cultures, and in Africa. Really, the only societies that no longer treat their elderly with proper respect are the western ones. The ones that are still majority White. White adult children have been receptive to the poisonous conditioning; your parents are stupid, and smelly, and sickly, and ask too many questions. They cramp your style. Put them away where we don’t have to see them. Put yourself first!
Japan has a Respect for the Aged Day. We have senior citizen discounts. The entire IHOP menu is half price for seniors every Wednesday. In the United States, about 28 percent of those aged 60 and above live alone, as opposed to an average of 16 percent in 130 countries surveyed in a recent poll. Looking at a Congressional Budget Office study from the 1980s, we find glaring changes just from 1960 to 1984. In 1960, less than 1/5 of the elderly lived alone, but by 1984 nearly 1/3 did. The percentage of elderly who lived with their adult children or other family members fell from 40 percent in 1960 to 22 percent by 1984. By the early 2000s, “age-friendly communities” were being pushed by none other than the World Health Organization. So you know they must be a good thing. By 2011, the racial differences were clear, even in America. 84 percent of elderly Whites lived alone or with their spouse, as opposed to 57 percent of Hispanics, 54 percent of Asians, and 46 percent of Blacks. White families rule!
They tell us that 52 percent of adults aged 65 or older today will need some type of long-term care in the future. About half of this “informal care giving” is still provided by adult children here. I guess that’s a bit of a pleasantly surprising number. But that still means that the other half of seniors who need long-term care have to get it somewhere else. In nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Sure, it has to be disheartening to have your adult child wipe your butt or feed you with a spoon, but it beats having some indifferent immigrant that barely speaks English do it. Being the often pessimistic guy I am, I read this statistic another way; half the adult children in America aren’t willing to help out their old and ailing parents. The glass is half empty. I have known people who sacrificed everything to care for their elderly parents. Almost always, if they have siblings, it isn’t a shared experience. The burden seems to fall completely on the child whose conscience first compels them to do it.
To me, there is no more noble task in life than caring for the man or woman who was responsible for you being born. The one who once wiped your butt, and fed you baby food. In most cases, this means that the adult child, whose siblings won’t help them, must basically put their own life on hold. Their own goals and aspirations must be subjugated to doing what must seem like a thankless task, because the elderly very often won’t be able to thank you themselves. But it truly is God’s work. Your other option is to have them pay $6,000 or more every month for the privilege of being housed in a facility where they will more than likely be neglected and mistreated. Where that 50 percent of children who wouldn’t lend a hand in assistance will seldom if ever remember them. I’ve seen too many loved ones in these places, and witnessed the lonely souls waiting for visits from supposed loved ones which never come.
I will always have a warm place in my heart for Natalie Merchant, the former lead singer of the group 10,000 Maniacs. She co-wrote the song Trouble Me in dedication to her father. It is a plea for an older loved one to ask for help. It goes against the modern narrative that old parents are a nuisance. Watch any television show or film produced in the last fifty years, and this message comes through loud and clear. The worst thing in the world, according to this insidious propaganda, is a visit from your aging mother and father. The Waltons was an exception to this mainstream indoctrination, and Clint Eastwood’s film Gran Torino did a nice job of depicting the emptiness and lack of love that exists in too many modern American families. This selfishness and lack of respect and empathy for the elderly is part of the overall anti-family agenda. It’s not much of a stretch from estrangement between parents and children to “gender reassignment” surgery and changing pronouns.
I’ve been in a few of these human cattle places recently. Chock full of 100 percent USDA not so finely aged human beings. It was heartbreaking to learn that the roommate of one of my loved ones had no visitors the entire month they roomed together, outside of her husband. Both in their 80s, and losing functions daily. She described how they realized too late that they should have had children. Is it better to have children who don’t care enough to visit you, or never have children at all, to paraphrase Tennyson. Nursing homes were rare in Asian countries until recently, but now the disastrous influence of our secular western culture is making inroads there, too. Soon there may not be any revered elders anywhere in the world. They’ll all just be ridiculed, ignored, and then taken away to parts unknown, like a waste removal service. The way we treat our elderly ought to bother everyone who isn’t elderly. Yet.
