Demonising the elderly

Jack King
VernonColeman.com

This essay is taken from `They want to kill us all’ by Jack King. To purchase a copy please CLICK HERE

Ageism is rife. Elder abuse is now common, with older citizens being bullied and harassed and demonised when they are at their most vulnerable; frail and in need of caring, support, sympathy, patience and understanding.

The elderly and the poor will be demonised and made to feel guilty if they don’t submit to euthanasia. Conditioning, propaganda and predictive programming are all being used to promote the idea that older citizens have a duty to die when they reach 70 years of age. Young people (by which I mean both the Z generation and the millennials) are encouraged to loathe anyone over 60 and to blame them for everything they feel is unsatisfactory in their own lives.

Nowhere is ageism more obvious than in health care. In the UK, the elderly have been abandoned. Women having sex change operations on the NHS are now being given free fertility treatment so that they can have babies after they become men. There is plenty of money to pay nursery school fees for rich parents but no money to provide care for the elderly. Britain’s health service has the staff, the time and the money to provide free gender ID clinics, but the elderly are not allowed to have cataract operations under the NHS until they are virtually blind (the authorities clearly hope that they will either be dead or too old for surgery). This absurd policy means that old people denied such surgery cannot look after themselves, and need to be cared for – usually by relatives or neighbours since the State won’t do that these days. No one in authority cares a damn about the quality of life of septuagenarians who are unable to feed themselves, read, use the internet or watch television. The politicians and the bureaucrats do not have the wit or imagination to realise that one day they too may be unable to feed themselves, use the internet or watch television.

And, of course, very little money is spent on properly diagnosing and preventing dementia. Alzheimer’s is the default diagnosis (GPs are paid a fee for every diagnosis of Alzheimer’s which they record) even though many other causes of dementia are treatable if diagnosed. And no one cares about the old people who haven’t been officially diagnosed as demented, because they aren’t yet quite that far gone, but who find daily life wavering between difficult and impossible in our increasingly demanding, aggressive and threatening age.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) has said that vulnerable, elderly patients are being forced to wait longer than other patients when they need urgent medical help because hospitals are being bribed with bonuses of up to £2 million if they achieve Accident and Emergency targets set by the Government. Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the RCEM, has said that the immediate short term financial rewards are short sighted and unhelpful. The NHS has set a target of 76% of patients attending A&E to be admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. (The older, official target was 95% but that has been abandoned because it hasn’t been hit since 2015.) Dr Boyle said that ‘everyone focuses on the quick wins and the easier patients, and we know that far too many people, once they have waited beyond four hours, they get stuck. So we know that last year there were more than 1.5 million people who stayed more than 12 hours in A&E.’ The end result is that elderly people are waiting days in pain and agony in A&E departments.

And, of course, ageism isn’t just a problem in the UK. It’s a worldwide problem, especially in industrialised societies where it is entrenched in all social institutions, particularly those involved in health care systems. The elderly are vulnerable and suffer massively from increased health risks, environmental pressures and economic stresses.

In all areas where assisted dying is legal, most people who are killed are over the age of 65. But they do not die because they are in pain or terminally ill. They die most commonly because of a loss of independence and dignity and because they can no longer enjoy the sports or hobbies which they previously enjoyed. A study in New Zealand showed that healthy older adults who supported assisted dying did so because they were worried about future impairment and dependency and about becoming a burden on others. They also worried that if they lived they might one day suffer intolerable pain. And so they would rather die now than risk an unpleasant future.

Finally, it is also worth pointing out that older people have admitted that their experiences during the covid-19 pandemic had hardened their views on assisted dying. They’d seen (or read about) what had happened to older people during lockdowns and hospital closures.

Despite all this, it is people under 65 who are more likely to support euthanasia. People become less enthusiastic about euthanasia as they get older.

And it has to be said that euthanasia is, for many, an irrelevance. Tiny pensions, too small to live on, and the increasing cost of heating and basic foodstuffs, mean that millions of old people have to choose between eating and heating in the winter months. In the UK, between 60,000 and 100,000 old people die of the cold every winter and those figures are similar elsewhere.

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Image: © iStock/Dean Mitchell. AWIP: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2024/10/15/demonising-the-elderly