Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way it cares for its helpless members. – Pearl S. Buck, former American writer.
Too often now have we just stopped feeling the pain of the elderly; too soon have we become desensitized to their disillusionment and estrangement. Removed we are becoming by the sheer familiarity of their outcry.
It cannot be that the Minister of Health must once again be threatening to put old people out of our national house of healing because they have been abandoned by their relatives, who care not that they are “causing immense pressure, as needed bed space is being occupied”.
It cannot be that in Senior Citizens Week – à la Geriatric Hospital – the minister must be driven to the point of declaring that the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) “will be taking a little bit more aggressive approach” to throwing out those elderly who have been discharged but callously left to wander the wards of the hospital.
And to think, as Minister Donville Inniss has pointed out, that the majority of these deserted old folks are receiving pensions, or “allowances”, or “have some form of income-generating source”! What kind of mind inflicts this type of trauma and degradation on its old? And the Geriatric Hospital’s manager Joanelle Oxley-Worrell lets us know some residents get few or no visits at all from relatives. How do family so scuttle the parental ship of love?
Clearly these delinquent younger relatives portray only betrayal, ingratitude, dishonour, disloyalty, spite, selfishness and, worse of all, cowardice. And no number of excuses could atone for these atrocities.
Our elderly have a right to sincere reverence and tenderness, and I haven’t seen much of either projected in this Senior Citizens Week thus far. Truth be told, there has not been much of anything good projected in the ageing’s favour since last the White Paper On A National Policy On Ageing – which was to morph into law to protect the elderly – was touted.
The best we can say for the subject was that it was well aired; but lip service doesn’t ease old people’s trauma, or feed them the honour they are entitled to by God’s command, or give them hope of survival with dignity. Government after Government has promised much and delivered little.
Like Days Of Our Lives, the abandoned old people’s stories of hope – proffered and proliferated by our politicians – have offered much drama and very little progression. Few of these public office holders have the guts to whip up any result-oriented frenzy against the criminality our aged are forced to suffer.
But then what should we expect from this national background of selfish social climbers, and half-naked wukking up mothers (with acquiescing or henpecked fathers), whose modus operandi is to egg on their children to smash the system, defying and undermining authority? What should we expect from the brek up and let the Government buy back syndrome?
We are now at the age where hardly anybody cares what others think. Everyone has his or her own opinion. Opinions no longer have rank by reason, logic or common sense.
One only requires a big mouth and a long tongue as qualification to spit out nonsense as informed opinion. The unlettered challenges the literati – aided and abetted by the United Nations Declaration Of Rights.
Once, we were contented to sit humbly at the feet of the Carlisle Burtons, the Garry Soberses, Courtney Blackmans, the Clifton Glasgows and the like of this world, and in deference learn something profound and character-building. Now under the United Nations Declaration Of Rights we can tell the sages, with impunity, they are talking bare boo.
If we as a people throw the very timbre of respect for our seniors to the whirlwind, how can it be expected that we will have any desire to be inconvenienced by them, furthermore make any sacrifice for them – as they did for us?
The powers that be must see to it that our old people are never deserted by the young, if they will indeed pass the test of civilization.
• Ridley Greene is a Caribbean multi-award-winning journalist.