Written by Frederica

 

Many of us will have experience in looking after older relatives at some time in our lives.  We will watch our parents (or even our partners in life) ageing before our eyes.  We do not really give any thought to the fact that we, in our turn, will also age. We think that because our minds and faculties are still in full working order that life will continue along that peaceful plateau for a long time to come. Until … one day …:

Who is this person looking out of my mirror

It cannot be me I am twenty years old

The person I see has seen decades pass by

Those eyes seem to speak of a lifetime remembered

Their depths carry knowledge time only can buy

There’s a bit more in the middle but I will keep it short: 

My span has been brief my life’s work lies before me

I hope I will make good use of my time

So that when I must own this face now before me

I will brave the last judgement with head held high

There comes a time for us all when ‘where shall we go today’ on those carefree days of holidays or at weekends suddenly come to an end due to ill health or infirmity.  Then there is often dependency upon others to do the things that we can no longer do for ourselves.  It is galling to find that the mind is still active and alive when the body becomes less compliant with our wishes.

Over the years, there has been a growing lack of respect for ‘age’.  Despite the insistence of governments that they ‘care’ and the setting up of agencies to help, advise and mitigate the effects of ageing, there has arisen an indefinable feeling that ageing is somehow shameful.  The days when older people were looked up to for their knowledge and wisdom and their life stories were listened to with genuine interest are gone. 

This seems synonymous with the escalating intent to stifle history and the wealth of erudition and philosophy that history imparts to mankind.  Unless, of course, history may be used for political purposes to denigrate times past and bring down the memories and achievements of those who lived back then. The ‘woke’ generation has set out to drive a steamroller though anything from the past thus implying that ‘old’ is to be condemned.  Life is now only for the young who seem to  have no consciousness or care for the imbalances that they are creating for future generations.

The stories of ‘care home’ abuse that should engender huge outrage, shock and condemnation are simply another form of the ‘nine day’s wonders’ that merely elicit a ‘lessons will be learned’ response from an uncaring Establishment.

Thus, the recent experience of the elderly being shipped out of hospitals into care homes, regardless of whether they would be at risk from the COVID virus or not, was just another exposition of the disregard for the dignity of the aged.  The elderly are deemed to be expendable.  No doubt because they are considered to be too expensive to maintain i.e. payment of pensions and cost of care, medical treatments etc. Not that the Health Service is now anything more than a lottery for the elderly.  Even getting through to a doctor carries odds almost as great as winning a Sweepstake.

There is no longer any respect for the years of toil, struggle and fortitude displayed throughout most older people’s lives as they have worked to maintain themselves and their own families.  The elderly are seen as a nuisance, a stumbling block to the political plans for a new era of serfdom – because the elderly remember life as it was lived.  Before the ‘terror’ was visited upon us, when decency, dignity and diligence were the passport to an independent life.  A time when work and thrift enabled one to exist without fear of overweening political influence in one’s daily round.

Recently there was a television series entitled ‘Care Homes for Four Year Olds’. It was of great  interest because it displayed, very strongly, that the interaction between young and old can be beneficial for all!  Even if the Covid ‘terror’ had not appeared, I do not think that it will ever be something that will be encouraged long term.  For one thing, the reprehensible way in which education of the very young is tending more toward inappropriate indoctrination would be severely stymied by allowing the very young to be exposed to the wisdom and experience of the very old.

Yet, I believe that in an honest and well regulated society the older generation could have a very beneficial effect on the education of the very young.  The older generation had a far more broad-based, life-skills accented education.  They also remember a time when children could roam freely without fear of molestation.  They remember the time when crime was suitably and effectively punished.  In those days foreign criminals were not permitted free-rein while being protected from deportation by partisan lawyers.

In past societies, where family groups lived within easy distance of each other,  grandparents often had great input and influence on the lives of their grandchildren (and great-grandchildren) to very good effect!

But in this rapidly ‘declining into dystopia’ life, the desire for total control by ‘Big State’ over all lives by keeping everyone separate from another, the very beneficial effects of family life are being strongly discouraged.  Politicians, whose own lives are amongst the most privileged and pampered in society will probably never know anything approaching the want and dependency of many older people today.  In exposing the very old and ill to the dangers of the ‘experimental gene therapy’, politicians are guilty of abuse of the elderly.  For a substance that has not yet reached the end of the phase three trials period to be pumped indiscriminately into the elderly is unforgivable.  

Therefore I conclude that the 21st century will not go down in the annals of history (assuming that history will still be allowed to be recorded!) as an age of ‘enlightenment’.  On the contrary it will be remembered as an age of repression and darkness.  

I am reminded of a quotation from Jude the Obscure where the eldest son hanged his brothers and sisters and then himself, leaving a note saying “Because we are too many”.  His parents had found themselves hard pressed to feed and clothe their large brood.  Is that how the politically insane class, which is visiting dystopia upon the World, views the population in general and the elderly in particular?