So I saw an article in my local newspaper this morning about a marked rise in elder abuse in this country. There's a similar article here. The reality is that current projections, according to that article, show that the number of Americans over age 65 will DOUBLE by 2030. The so called "baby boomer" generation is said to be some 74 million strong. Thanks to our ever growing population of selfish youngsters we're increasingly putting our elders into homes, stealing their retirements, and treating them like children, verbally and physically abusing them.
I'm not going to address the elder abuse specifically. The point I'd like to get out is that we should not be surprised. We have been warned for years now that our society has been moving this direction. There is a culture of selfishness and death in our nation (and world) like never before. Whether we are willing to admit it or not we're in some ways become like the loathed Nazi Germany. The Nazi party at the time began disarming the public (as many Democrats are now asking for). They then began systematically segregating certain portions of the population which were seen as "less desirable". The most widely recognized of those people were the Jews (of which millions were killed). However, what isn't as commonly known are all the so called "mentally ill" and physically disabled persons who were housed in "hospitals". These people were entirely removed from society as some manner of perfecting the German populace. Ultimately, they too were killed in manners strikingly similar to those used to destroy the Jewish population.
So what does this have to do with America today? We have ultimately decided, be it consciously or not, that old people are no longer desirable. As children of these aging folks we simply don't want to care for them. We don't want the hassle. We don't want the expense (and maybe we simply can't pay for it). It is, after all, difficult to take care of an adult person. Especially if that person has lost mental capacity or physical capacities (or both!). So now we place all our old people into segregation from the general population. Or we simply move away and don't live anywhere near them. During the time I spent in law enforcement I recall many times where we dealt with aging persons who had no relatives that lived in the same state. It was difficult to get assistance for these persons who often were beginning to suffer from memory issues (like Alzheimer Disease).
But we shouldn't be surprised. We are after all a country that destroys hundreds of thousands of unborn children every single year. Planned Parenthood along claimed to have perform some 330,000 abortions last year. Here is yet another example of our desire to remove those whom we deem "undesirable" or "inconvenient". The war cry of the "pro-choice" groups continues to be that they want to "choose" when to have a child. Why is it no longer considered the right or responsible thing to simply stop having sex? If you ask me, aside from being forcibly raped, any woman who becomes pregnant made the choice to do so. She willingly allowed a man to impregnate her after all. It's not like it was some random event and nobody "saw it coming". We do after all have scientific evidence pointing toward a correlation between sex and pregnancy.
Today however many of us choose not to have children because we either want to focus on our career, finances, or simply don't want the responsibility. These I would suggest are the same excuses we would use for neglecting or abusing our elders. Now, I'm not saying that every person who has placed their aging parent in a home is inherently evil and selfish. There are certainly circumstances where a person simply cannot provide the 24 hour care that's needed for some of our aging population. If you have a job and children and suddenly have a parent who needs constant care I can understand entirely how you might not be able to do it (especially alone). But we're getting to the point now where people are suggesting we start euthanizing the elderly!
When does it stop? At what point do we finally decide we have to draw the line? The problem with the selfish nature of our culture is that we are no longer capable of thinking logically (let alone morally). We've become so adept that rationalizing our excuses into valid reasons that we can come up with a legitimate excuse for just about anything we want. There are now lots of so called reasons why we should legalize dangerous drugs. We rationalize why we should be spending more and more money on welfare programs that aren't even designed to help people back on their feet. We rationalize that the pro-life movement is just a bunch of crotchety old white men who want to oppress women by forcing them to give up their "rights" to abortion. Yet, ironically, most of the people who are really influentially pushing the pro-life cause are actually women!
Until we stop living in such a selfish manner things are only going to get worse. We want things handed to us on a silver platter. We don't want inconveniences. We want more and more "rights" to things which no right should even be had. We don't want to live rightly, justly, or properly. We simply want to live our own way. We want to decide what is right and what is wrong for us specifically. No longer does it matter what anyone else thinks; they're all wrong after all. Our mentality has become "What's right for me may not be what's right for you." Let's face it folks, after the entirety of humanity's existence we've gotten nowhere. We're right back to Original Sin.
We want to be gods for ourselves. We want to decide right and wrong.
