No nation that treats the elderly like the U.S. does can be a “great” nation. From Donald Jeffries at donaldjeffries.substack.com:
A plantation of oldsters
I’ve been spending far too much time in hospitals, nursing homes, and rehab places this year. Not as a patient, but visiting loved ones. These facilities are all, every one of them, a national disgrace. If anything should be condemned, they should be. They are indistinguishable from one another in their cold, sterile neglect of human beings.
The lack of uniqueness in these places mirrors our crony capitalist system in general. They don’t compete with each other, trying to provide better service and care. They understand, as does everyone running any decent sized business in America 2.0, that John D. Rockefeller set the template for them all with his “competition is a sin” credo. At the rehab center I’ve been visiting several times a week, 99 percent of the staff is nonwhite. This includes the few doctors that ever appear. Most of them come from Africa. They are almost all surly, with accents one struggles to understand. One of them attempted to argue with me when I said I was pleasantly surprised that my loved one seemed better that day. They balk at bringing water to a patient. They don’t answer the buzzer every patient has. It’s literally criminal the way these once vibrant people are treated. The attractive White nurses at the hospital where I once worked were Florence Nightingales in comparison, and they were subpar themselves.
I am now sixty nine years old. I’m aware that some of those stuck in these godforsaken places are younger than me. I shiver at the prospect of ever being a patient, and not merely a visitor. I look into their wrinkled faces, as I pass them in the hallways. Some of them gesture, and try to say something, which I usually can’t understand. There are always loud cries of “help me” emanating from the rooms. To be fair, I heard those same cries nearly fifty years ago as a young hospital worker. I learned to ignore them, as the nurses invariably did. I wonder about those faces, and the white hairs that sit atop them. The eyes which still glisten, and seem to want to convey something that their mouths can’t. I wonder how many of them were extroverts like me. What did they do for a living? Some of them, undoubtedly, held positions of importance. All of them must have once walked through facilities like this themselves, and perhaps felt the same sympathy I do for those trapped there.
