Shortly previous to his loss of life from prostate most cancers in August of this 12 months on the age of 72, my father emerged from a state of muteness to recite, with a burst of vitality, the 1927 poem, Crusing to Byzantium, by William Butler Yeats, which begins: “That’s no nation for outdated males.”
My mom, my uncle, and I have been current for the impromptu efficiency, which happened in my father’s mattress in Washington, DC, the place he had commenced in-home hospice care after the chemotherapy therapies that had been pressured upon him by profit-oriented medical doctors had accelerated his demise.
This was however certainly one of many poems my father had memorised as a younger man intent on honing his mental credentials; my mom and uncle – who of their youth had additionally fallen below the affect of my dad’s cerebral pursuits – joined in on the strains they remembered. Having accomplished his vehement recitation, my father resumed his usually mute state, which was thereafter punctuated solely by intermittent outbursts about desirous to die.
I’ve no means of realizing what was going by means of my dad’s thoughts throughout that closing poetic eruption, however the first line of the Yeats poem did appear to be a becoming commentary on the nation during which we discovered ourselves – the one the place we had all been born and the one my mother and father and I had spent years avoiding. My mother and pop had solely comparatively not too long ago returned to reside within the homeland after practically eight years in Barcelona; I had flown into Washington in August from Turkey, which was certainly one of my common stops in a 20-year self-imposed exile.
Certainly, my father’s closing months had merely confirmed that the US is “no nation for outdated males”. Counterproductive chemotherapy therapies have been however one of many methods he had been milked for all he was value, earlier than being turned over as prey to the profitable realm of funeral and cremation providers.
For instance, for a one-month prescription of the prostate most cancers drug Xtandi, a medicine developed with none aside from US taxpayer cash, my father had been charged $14,579.01 – ie, greater than many individuals in the US earn in a number of months. For folk missing the means to pursue healthcare and different primary wants, US capitalism could be lethal, too.
And whereas US society specialises in oppressing a variety of demographics – minus, after all, the elite minority that thrives on acute inequality – the therapy of the aged is especially cynical. Having outlived their labour-based exploitability as cogs within the capitalist machine, older individuals grow to be decaying objects from which revenue should proceed to be extracted till the final minute.
In line with the outcomes of a West Well being-Gallup survey revealed in 2022, roughly one in 4 People aged 65 and older and three in 10 People between the ages of fifty and 64 stated they’d sacrificed primary wants, resembling meals, to pay for healthcare.
The examine discovered that older ladies and Black People have been disproportionately affected and that punitive well being care prices constituted a big supply of stress within the every day lives of older People, with stress naturally solely exacerbating present medical points.
Add vampire-like insurance coverage firms to the combination, and the panorama turns into ever extra morbid. The prohibitive charges related to many programmes – coupled with insurance coverage outfits’ frequent refusal to cowl lifesaving therapies – signifies that life itself continues to be a privilege and never a proper in the US.
Then there’s the $34bn assisted-living business, which a current Washington Put up investigation revealed to be suffering from wanton neglect regardless of charging a mean of $6,000 a month per resident. Since 2018, the Put up reported, greater than 2,000 residents have wandered off unnoticed from such amenities, and practically 100 of them have died after doing so.
A lot for “assisted residing”.
To make certain, the loneliness and isolation that so usually attends outdated age within the US does nothing to extend life expectancy; nor does the distinctive stigma that US “tradition” attaches to ageing. Because the American Psychological Affiliation (APA) has famous, institutionalised ageism in the US entails a “host of destructive results, for individuals’s bodily and psychological wellbeing and society as a complete”.
Granted, loneliness and isolation are sometimes lifelong afflictions for inhabitants of the so-called “land of the free”, the place the collective psychological wellbeing is hardly helped by a dog-eat-dog insistence on particular person success on the expense of communal and household bonds and the conversion of human beings into consumerist automatons.
And the cutthroat, transactional nature of existence within the US culminates, appropriately, with aged our bodies being put up for grabs by pharmaceutical firms, nursing houses, and the company racket generally known as the US healthcare system.
That stated, the US is, actually, a high quality nation for some outdated males – resembling former warmongering diplomat Henry Kissinger, who perished at dwelling in Connecticut in November on the ripe outdated age of 100 after spending an excellent a part of his life inflicting the deaths of numerous individuals worldwide.
Not lengthy after my father’s loss of life in August, I fell into dialog with a Bolivian man in his 50s who had resided in Washington for greater than 20 years and who expanded on the “no nation” theme. He deliberate to stay it out for one more 10 to fifteen years earlier than returning to his dwelling metropolis of Cochabamba, he informed me, as a result of he couldn’t afford to be outdated within the US.
And whereas the US could also be “no nation for outdated males”, it’s not a lot of a rustic for anybody else, both.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
