Roger,
Your neighbor's situation is one that is being repeated over and over
across this "great" nation. Without knowing any personal details
regarding your neighbor's wants and needs, I can only speak to our
work with a vast number of folks Cathy and I have encountered over
these past 24 years. Over 3,000. Many are fortunate to have caring
family around them. Many have broad circles of caring friends. Some
can afford to hire companions and care givers, allowing them to stay
in their own homes until the end. But an equal number are living
perilous lives, inches away from financial, physical and spiritual
collapse. Some live lonely lives within the homes of their children.
They are parked in their own room and left alone. Some live alone,
watching as their world falls in around them. Piles of garbage and
broken furniture, mold, leaking roofs, limited heat in cold weather,
all add to their desperate lives. And even we who care are too often
helpless to do anything. Some of us build a wall of protection,
saying that it's their own fault that caused them to end up like that.
Others of us do what we can, but we don't really know what to do, so
their situation never improves.
For a period of time we had a government that set up programs and
channeled funding to provide in-home services and build Assisted
Living Apartments for people in their twilight years. But we seem to
be swinging back to those days when "America was Great!" In those
glory days we left care of our elders to the families and to
charitable church organizations.
But as poorly as that system worked, we can't return to it. We have
pretty much done away with the extended families, with several
generations living together on the family farm. Today Mom cannot
afford to stay home and care for the elders and the children. Mom
works, as does Dad. They do this in order to keep abreast of the
increasing cost of staying abreast. Grandma's social security check
helps the expenses, but it is not enough to hire even a part time care
giver.
To all of those who tell me that Capitalism has redeeming graces, I
would have them travel with Cathy and me for a few weeks, and meet so
many of Capitalism's victims.
I look about me and I see men and women who labored all their lives,
fighting our wars, producing our products, raising their children,
paying their taxes and volunteering in their community churches and
organizations. Once retired, they have been tossed onto the garbage
heap. Abandoned as worthless, useless. Today's society seems to say,
"If your producing days are over, why the Hell don't you do the decent
thing and die?"
The underlying problem we face is Greed. And Capitalism is to Greed
what a Bee Hive is to a hungry Bear.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/30/18, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don't suppose this relates much to anything we have been talking
about and it is unlikely that any of you care, but there is some turmoil
going on here. My next door neighbor has been suffering from dementia
and lack of mobility for some time now and he seems to have just taken a
turn for the worse, a severe turn for the worse. Hospice was contacted
about him just a couple of days ago and they did send someone out with a
morphine shot today. But just now his wife called his nurse and the
nurse is on the way out here, but she said over the phone that this is
probably the end.
--
_________________________________________________________________
Isaac Asimov
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in
telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life
after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved
negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement,
and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no
matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and
more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the
evidence will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov
