The Unlucky Elderly of America 2.0

At the mercy of a real shithole culture

“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.

Many older people feel abandoned by their children and grandchildren. That’s assuming they had children. What about the lifelong bachelor, or the woman who never married? With both the marriage and birthrate plummeting, this promises to be an unfortunate reality for an increased number of future senior citizens. About a third of all parents who have experienced estrangement from their children told a survey that they’d contemplated suicide. This curious estrangement between adult children and their parents is a tragic but exploding phenomenon in America 2.0. Imagine the holidays for those estranged from their children. Or imagine the holidays in an antiseptic nursing home, where some elderly spinster gazes at the Christmas tree and wonders what it might have been like to watch her own children opening Christmas presents. Or the old father who waits for children who never come. Even at Christmas.

Obviously, the epidemic of family dysfunction with its horrific symptom of estrangement is closely related to how our society treats its longest lived members. After all, if so many adult children have made the seemingly inexplicable decision to break off all contact with the parents who brought you into this world, then it’s not surprising that there are so few visitors in those awful nursing homes. And conversely, I know of parents who just as irrationally cut off contact with their adult children, and have refused to help them even when they’re in dire straits. In one case, the adult child was living in a tent in the woods. The “generation gap” which was talked about so much in the 1960s and 1970s has become a veritable Grand Canyon. Long hair, drugs, and promiscuous sex have turned into “transitioning” your kindergartner and lecturing your loved ones about “White privilege.” When you’re White yourself.

Those children and grandchildren who always find something better to do than visit their senior loved ones will be old one day themselves. Very, very quickly. There is no truer expression than “time flies.” And then perhaps they’ll experience the beauty of karma, such as it exists, as their own children will have learned first hand about relationships with those too old to live independently. That’s if they get to become old. With the warp speed vaccine, and regular medical “care,” they’re apt to die before they can get the senior citizen discounts. Old age is hell, but as they say, it beats the alternative. I’ve known too many who didn’t live long enough to collect Social Security, or enjoy any kind of retirement. Or long enough to discover how little they meant to their children and grandchildren. I guess it’s some kind of a blessing to avoid all the infirmaries, and the small, lonely room that has become your home.

As RFK, Jr. likes to remind us, there is an epidemic of chronic illness in America 2.0. And no one has more chronic illnesses than the elderly. Big Pharma products to mask the issues. A cane, a walker, or a wheelchair to assist you in moving from point A to point B. Perhaps an oxygen mask. Or an adult diaper. The trappings of old age in what we’re told is the most advanced civilization the world has ever seen. It strikes me that elderly people today aren’t really any healthier, any more mobile or clear headed, than the elderly were in the nineteenth century. Where was Alzheimer’s 100 years ago? And yes, there were plenty of oldsters then who should have had it. Maybe it was hiding out with cancer, and autism, and Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Parkinson’s, until just the right moment. I can attest to the fact that the old people I saw as a child were not using walkers, and didn’t have oxygen masks. I doubt they had dementia, either.

John Prine wrote a beautiful song about the agony of aging parents, Hello in There. There is wisdom in those “hollow, ancient eyes” he spoke of. Sights, and smells, and tastes, that exist no more. I think of all the technological toys from my own past that are gone. Transistor radios. Portable record players. Eight track and cassette tapes. Video cassette tapes and camcorders. Black light posters. View-Master projectors. I was born with a tremendous nostalgic streak in me, and I always related to old people. They fascinated me. Because of my lifelong love of history, I marveled at their tales of an age that I could never experience. When I hear of an old person being a victim of elder abuse, I liken it to child abuse. It’s that incomprehensible to me. The older we get, most of us become increasingly dependent, like children. And when we become too dependent, too inconvenient, then they simply lock us away somewhere.

There are haunting old daguerreotypes, photos of the last surviving Revolutionary War soldiers. The last Confederate veteran died in the 1950s. Many of the older people I met in my childhood had been born in the 1800s. Think of how remote that is. Even my salad days of the 1970s and 1980s seem like they took place in a different world. The elderly are our direct connection to the past, and to our individual roots. I only knew one of my grandparents, and she died when I was twelve. I wish I’d been able to talk with my grandfather about the 1890s, or turning on his first electric light. I wish I’d had the honor- and it is an honor- to care for my aged parents or grandparents. Nursing homes should be outlawed. Retirement communities represent a cruel segregation. If you’re blessed with parents who live a long life, revel in that. Enjoy them. Care for them, as they cared for you. We absolutely can do much better.