05-19-2016, 10:13 PM
(05-18-2016, 01:44 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(05-12-2016, 06:29 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I may have saved my father's life.
I got a call from the nursing home about 8 AM EST stating that my father was showing signs of circulatory failure -- discoloration of his knees -- due to dehydration and malnutrition. I was asked whether I wanted to have the nursing home 'make him comfortable' or send him to the hospital. I went to the nursing home with my dog (the dog has a right to know if the end is nigh for a loved one, I suppose, as he got to know for my mother), and my father responded more to the dog than to me. But he did face me.
I am not writing him off. I decided to send him to the hospital so that he could be treated for the dehydration and malnutrition. Guess what happened? The hospital took him off Fentanyl, and he started moving his legs about.
"Make him comfortable". I am glad that I could read between the lines on that piece of Orwellian deceit.
Nursing homes -- where capitalist greed meets socialist irresponsibility.
It's too bad that Dickens or Hugo isn't around to relate such a nightmare. You have seen it from me, from someone with practically no literary talent.
With all the aging Boomers and a decent number of them with significant assets I'm confident we are going to see yet another Boomer led revolution - this time in the realm of dealing with aging. This is the one area where I look forward to walking in the footsteps of the Boomers. Xers will have all sorts of options to deal with aging and the costs will just get lower and lower the more we age (well, at least true for us Ataris - longer lived Nintendos will experience increasing costs due to the onset of Millie aging ... ).
But I am a Boomer, and my father is a Depression-era Silent. Nursing-home costs have destroyed my chance of starting over. I am beginning to wish that I had chain-smoked so that I would already be dead from cancer. I have no real way to start over. I am in a community that I loathe and have no reasonable way out. Medical insurance costs more than the payments on a Mercedes-Benz at my age.
A few Boomers have unimaginable assets because they are members or have been members of the Executive elite, people paid very well for treating workers very badly on behalf of even richer people. These people get rich by creating and enforcing mass poverty. Those Boomers are conspicuously successful. Now what about those who have had blue-collar, pink-collar, or low-paying white-collar jobs all their lives? Boomer elites have never shown solidarity with any other than people richer and more powerful than themselves.
What meaning have those elites left the rest of America?
Boomer economic elites are the worst exploiters in American history since the antebellum planters who had the audacity to claim that they were the best thing that ever happened to their slaves. Gilded elites? They had so little polish that they were easy to lampoon -- but at least they were the pioneers of Big Business that allowed economic modernization. Boomer elites have the polish -- and the power. Boomer elites are experts at treating other people badly while insisting that they be seen as benefactors to those that they exploit and abuse.
It's narcissism, folks. Someone who makes his living as a subordinate to the economic elites gets slave-like humility enforced upon him early. I can't imagine a waitress or checker-cashier of even the Boomer generation holding onto any conceit. What younger people hate in Boomers is what they see in Boomer elites -- men my age with wives less than half their age, two-ex-wives, and a raft of spoiled-brat kids who are never going to amount to anything. They went to college and had a fun official major with a minor in living beyond the means of most working people before they have ever held a job.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.