Shortly previous to his death from prostate cancer 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a burst of vitality, the 1927 poem, Crusing to Byzantium, by William Butler Yeats, which begins: “That’s no nation for outdated males.”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 had 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 typically mute state, which was thereafter punctuated solely by intermittent outbursts about desirous to die.
I’ve no manner of understanding what was going via my dad’s thoughts throughout that remaining poetic eruption, however the first line of the Yeats poem did appear to be a becoming commentary on the nation through which we discovered ourselves – the one the place we had all been born and the one my dad and mom and I had spent years avoiding. My mother and pop had solely comparatively not too long ago returned to reside within the homeland after almost 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Certainly, my father’s remaining months had merely confirmed that the US is “no nation for outdated males”. Counterproductive chemotherapy therapies had 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 companies.
For instance, for a one-month prescription of the prostate most cancers drug Xtandi, a drugs developed with none aside from US taxpayer cash, my father had been charged $14,579.01 – ie, greater than many individuals in america earn in a number of months. For folk missing the means to pursue healthcare and different primary wants, US capitalism may 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 remedy of the aged is especially cynical. Having outlived their labour-based exploitability as cogs within the capitalist machine, older individuals develop into decaying objects from which revenue should proceed to be extracted till the final minute.
In keeping with the outcomes of a West Well being-Gallup survey printed 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, corresponding to meals, to pay for healthcare.
The research discovered that older girls and Black People had been disproportionately affected and that punitive well being care prices constituted a major supply of stress within the every day lives of older People, with stress naturally solely exacerbating present medical points.
Add vampire-like insurance coverage corporations 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 america.
Then there’s the $34bn assisted-living trade, which a current Washington Put up investigation revealed to be affected by 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 services, and almost 100 of them have died after doing so.
A lot for “assisted residing”.
To make certain, the loneliness and isolation that so typically attends outdated age within the US does nothing to extend life expectancy; nor does the unique stigma that US “tradition” attaches to ageing. Because the American Psychological Affiliation (APA) has famous, institutionalised ageism in america entails a “host of destructive results, for individuals’s bodily and psychological wellbeing and society as an entire”.
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 corporations, nursing properties, and the company racket referred to as the US healthcare system.
That stated, the US is, the truth is, a high-quality nation for some outdated males – corresponding to former warmongering diplomat Henry Kissinger, who perished at residence in Connecticut in November on the ripe outdated age of 100 after spending an excellent a part of his life causing the deaths of countless people worldwide.
Not lengthy after my father’s demise in August, I fell into dialog with a Bolivian man in his 50s who had resided in Washington for greater than twenty 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 residence metropolis of Cochabamba, he advised 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 anyone else, either.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.