There is a collective shame to be placed upon our nation, a shame that challenges the very nature of our humanity, a shame that highlights the cruel irony of the mindset of our nation in the current day.
While we find it easy to complain about crime, corruption, high food prices and all the like, we fail to take stock of ourselves. We should be ashamed of the way we treat and deal with the elderly. Those people who are our parents and grandparents, who made tremendous sacrifices and endured unspeakable hardship to raise their children and provide for their families, are now being treated with disdain and scorn. The elderly, who in most cultures are regarded as sacred; leaders, as troves of wisdom, have now been ostracised to the fringes of society and are regarded as nothing more than a nuisance to be managed.
Many are the stories that can be told of mothers who had no food to eat for themselves and would give what little to their children. Of mothers who had only one outfit to wear and would go barefoot so their children could have money to go to school. Many are the stories of fathers who in order to make ends meet, were reduced to performing manual tasks, often laced with ridicule and insults. Fathers who did not sleep for days, working two and three jobs or planting the land so that they could pay for lessons and books for their children.
One only needs to ask an elderly person of the hardship they endured and the tales rival any of the great classic tragedies. Tales of abuse and discrimination, of racism and starvation, of tears and sacrifice. But our forebears took all of these in stride because they were providing for their progeny, seeking to make their lives better so that they would not have to experience the same hardship.
Now, in the twilight years of their lives when it is time for them to be honoured for their hard work and contribution to their nation, their own children and grandchildren and their nation have thrown them to the wayside. One only has to take a trip to any bank at the beginning of the month to see how the elderly are treated. Their benefactors, who take great joy in collecting their old age pension, abuse them, are impatient with them and treat them worse than animals.
Yes, there are those who honour their elderly, and these people should be praised for recognising that the elderly have dignity and deserve respect. The others, however, who insult their elders and make them cry, are worse than the lowest of the low, and the tears of the elderly will haunt them till the end of days. Children shun the responsibility of taking care of their own parents who may have become weak or disabled. The same parents who cleaned them as children, they now scorn and regard as burdens.
There is no excuse, no line of reasoning that can be used to justify the total lack of respect, and abuse, that are being perpetrated against our elderly. As per the ethos of our country, everyone is happy to talk about the neighbour and how they treat their elderly while the ones in their own houses are left without care or supervision. Our elderly suffer not only from conditions related to age and lifestyle but are also susceptible to mental conditions— still a taboo topic in our culture. The painful disease known as Alzheimer's is affecting many of our elderly who sometimes, on a daily basis, have to cry and grieve all over again when told their loved ones are dead. This scary disease is not yet big on our medical radar, but it is killing our elderly.
To their great distress, the elderly are often placed in retirement homes because their children have no time for the people who brought them into the world and cared for them. They are placed into homes, some of which are nothing short of torture chambers designed to end their lives.
I make no qualms to emphatically state that because old age homes are not regulated, the State has a big part to play in institutionalised murder. Yes, murder. These homes that should be staffed by doctors and trained geriatric nurses are instead run by private entrepreneurs who are seeking to make a profit on pensioners and cut as much cost as possible. They are bathing the elderly with hoses out in an open yard, feeding them food not fit for dogs and medicating them on aspirin and Panadol only.
This is indeed a shame, and it is high time that some draconian measures be employed to afford the elderly the dignity they deserve. Firstly, all retirement homes should be medical facilities and be regulated by the State. The State should also follow the lead of the Canadian government and have some form of state system of retirement homes that can be funded by the same pension funds. Thus, there is no increase in cost.
The final and most important, however, is something no law can change. It is for our nation to regain our lost respect and love for the elderly. We need to remember that they are the reason why we are here, and though some may have become feeble or ill with age, they are still people. They are still as valuable as we are, and how we treat them is a window into how we will be treated when we are old. It's time for us to wake up and treat with our elderly. Until then, the following statement will continue to shame us: One parent can look after a dozen children, but a dozen children cannot look after one parent.
—Rajiv Gopie won the President's Medal in 2006 for business/modern studies. He is an MSc candidate in international relations at the London School of Economics.
this article has been taken from
http://www.trinidadexpress.com/commentaries/Neglecting_the_elderly-125614963.html
