Listen To Your Elders

I recently had cause to visit the gym at the hospital where my wife needed physio, I accompanied my wife but could naturally take no part in her treatment. However, I was able to observe the other patients being treated in the gym. This situation was both inspiring and depressing.

Many of the patients being treated were old as would be expected but a surprising number were young men suffering paraplegia, there were no women suffering this way there in the gym at this time. I could only guess that the majority of these young men were so handicapped from having been involved in awful accidents.

The inspiring part of this visit was to observe the gentle and kindly way in which the staff dealt with these men. I thought that it must have been very hard to go to work each day to be faced with such sad cases knowing that despite all your efforts there is little that you can do for these young men other than keep them sane and comfortable.

In particular there was one young man that seemed to be paralysed completely and could only move his mouth, he also had a life support system fixed to the wheel chair and pipes going into his every part. Sad indeed but he was accompanied by a young woman that appeared to be his wife. This got me thinking about what is caring?

It is all very well to be kind to these people but I wonder if they have ever been asked the question as to what they want for a future. I can imagine this young man looking at his wife and thinking how terrible it must be for her, and what the future holds for her. He must feel that his incapacity had not only ruined his life but has ruined the life of someone that is most beloved to him.

I wonder if the medical profession has put it to him that if he finds that it is all too hard and that he doesn’t feel that he can cause so much suffering in the future, then he has only to say the word and the profession will facilitate his gentle and dignified demise.

I am aware that if you asked a loved one the question about whether this young man should be allowed to terminate his life,  they couldn’t make the decision, it would be too hard and it would maybe make them feel guilty. However, I think that the difficulty in making a decision that would avoid this young man’s mental and physical suffering is the result of our having been raised to think that death is a punishment rather than a necessary part of life.

I am not heartless and I can well understand the terrible trauma that such situations place ordinary people in, situations that they can’t be trained to face up to in the normal every day run of the mill life, but I feel that the person that is most effected by the situation is the person that has the least say in what his/her future should be. I can’t accept all the crap about the sanctity and ” right to ” life, life is for living and once one is not able to participate in living, then the choice should be there to finish life painlessly.

This is a matter that I am increasingly mindful of since my wife and I are now of an age when the onset of dementia and other age related incapacitating complaints become ever more a possiblility. I read all this rubbish about the old becoming and increasingly high cost to the community because of the espense of operating nursing homes and the like to house all these zombie like creatures. This problem is a self imposed problem not a real problem. I together with most of my friends of similar age, don’t want to be kept alive sitting drooling, eating gunk, knowing no one, being bathed, put to sleep probably with sleeping pills etc. When I don’t know that I am me and can’t remember, recall or act out, my life in a meaningful way, then I am dead, the fact that others still have the ability to keep my body functioning is not keeping me alive. I am the sum of all my feelings and experiences and once those functions of the brain have gone then I no longer exist

Surely, caring is providing what is best for the patient and if the patient is suffering because of unwanted treatment, then the caring becomes a way of satisfying the needs of the carer more than a true caring for the patient!?

I know that things like dementia block out all memories and feelings but whilst I am still able to think, I have already decided that I don’t want to be a cause of pain and unnecessary euffering to my loved ones, far better that they can only remember me as me and not come and look at drooling zombie!

Adele Horine, Saturday Morning Herald wrote an article on this subject which seemed to me to be more about the problems created for the relatives than the wishes of the afflicted person.

All the problems that Adele made comment about are accepted but, I am now about my 80’s, one year off infact and my wife is of similar age, and we don’t want to become a mass of heaving flesh that has no realization of any of the surrounding beauties of life.

I can’t see how they can ever effect a cure of alzheimers desease since it is a destruction of the brain cells that are ones memory. It may be possible to reverse the deterioration of the brain but it is hard to imagine a situation where you can reimplant the memories experienced in the past. Consequently, if I forgot my wife and children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, the recovery of my brain could only mean that I could again learn who these people are. However, they couldn’t reimplant the memories of the experiences that I have had with these people so, they would never regain the closeness they have at this time.

If I have made such a bad job of raising my family that they are unable to amicably sort out my estate then they deserve all the problems that they inherit. I like to consider that we have made a relatively good job of raising our off spring and that they will be more interested in continuing to live as a cohesive family rather than fighting over the pittance that we will leave.

I would like to have access to the drugs that would allow me to terminate my life with dignaty and not have my wife of some 60 years left with the responsibility of having to see me turn into a useless burden, and I certainly don’t want to see my wife submitted to the indignaty of becoming a drooling lump of flesh. What happens to the estate isn’t really relavent to this problem, it is the dignity of the persons that feel that they are turning into the living dead. Iam the total of my memories and experiences and without these I am dead!

I cannot accept that I have a right to life but I do think that I have a right to decide when I am ready to die. The course of nature will determine if I am allowed to survive and it has nothing to do with any right I may think that I have to be allowed to live, I can work hard and fail and, alternatively, I can loaf around and make no effort to get on and end up a millionaire, we have no rights only a hand to play to the best of our ability  with the luck we inherit. I have no more right to life than a child born with aids in Africa but I have had better luck so have enjoyed a far better and happier life.

I find it most annoying to have people tell me that I have to live because it will enhance their prospects of getting to heaven and inheriting eternal life, but they don’t want to pay taxes and donate their time to really helping people that should be able to live but through circumstances beyond their control have little chance of living a happy life. It would be different if I were to propose that the rules should be changed to make it mandatory that people be euthanazed when they have dementia, then they would have something to worry about and it would be me imposing my system on them instead of vice versa.

What we want is freedom of choice with controls to ensure that the idea isn’t corrupted to make it more easy for ” rotten ” families to get their filthy hands on estates sooner than would normally be the case

I recently read two articles on the availability of housing and town planning to meet future needs. These articles were very interesting and the comments from readers were also very informative; however, there was no attempt to address the real reason for the existing and ever expanding problem. The articles were a Greens blog and a blog in The Age which were mainly based on the provision of housing into the future.

When reading these articles I began to wonder if any one had thought about why we were in such dire straights regarding over crowding of our cities and pollution every where and global warming. To me the answer is quite straight forward, we have assumed a ” better than you attitude ” towards all other creatures and life forms on this planet whereas we are really just another animal that has to live within the confines and parameters set by our natural environment.

We are prepared to accept that other animal forms can over breed and destroy their environment but we seem to think that we can keep on breeding without any regard to our effect on the environment for, not only ourselves but for all other life forms. We are prepared to cull other creatures that we consider are over breeding but we don’t apply the same logic to our own over breeding

I notice that the Greens talk of halving the carbon output of each person but if one thinks about this it is only a temporary solution. If one of the many godheads we have created, could perform a miracle and halve the output of every individual tomorrow, the pollution would be back to todays figure in 50 years because of the doubling of the population and there will also then be the need for added space to accommodate the extra population.

Nature will solve this problem in its own way, we will eventually have a cull to satisfy the ambitions of our political and religious leaders but, with the destructive powers of todays weaponry, this could well be an act of overkill which would wipe out all human and possibly all other life forms. Accordingly, I think it would be better to devise a more acceptable means of population control.

If we could negate the powers of the various religions we should be able to accept that death isn’t a punishment and is really a part of life which enables life to update and refresh itself. Once we accept this fact, we can then look at controlling life and accepting that some people wish to die, others don’t wish to breed, other life forms are born monsters and should not be kept alive to satisfy the selfish desires of some frustrated woman rather than being allowed to die as would be the way of nature. There are many ways in which the population could be humanely regulated.
Furthermore, not all women want to devote their lives to children and raising families so they should be discouraged from just having babies at a late time of life to be able to say they are a “full woman”. Being a mother is actually a full time and very worthwhile station in life. Rather than having part time mothers that farm out their offspring we should encourage those women that really lust for motherhood, and would devote their whole waking hours to their children, to have children. As we know, in the present social system, those people that have lots of children are usually hard pressed to give those children the necessities of life. The system should be changed to ensure that good and willing parents are supported and are in a position to raise the future generation to the best available standards. And at the end of the parenting period, there should be a national pension scheme for these people to enable them to retire and enjoy all the life pleasures enjoyed by the career population.

I’m sure that if we could rid ourselves of all these gods and religions, we could devise a system whereby we could stabilize the world population at a level that would enable us to make full use of all the beauties of this world without destroying it and also live in peace. The latter would I think, require men to give up their sense of being the top dog, and there would have to be an acceptance of the fact that sex and sexuality are not the criteria by which you can make reasonable, logical and long-term decisions.

I wonder if we will ever generally develop a brain that appreciates that what is in our best interests isn’t always in the best interest of the future generations and others?

I have observed that there are two ways of living life, one is positive and the other is negative.

Positive people are resilient and bounce back whereas the negative people never win.

To be positive one has to have a few essential characteristics, one is to have hope, the other is to not expect too much from life and be pleased when things go well.

Negative people seem to have no hope, and even if things go well they tend to think that it is no more than they deserve and don’t appreciate their good fortune.

I’m aware that it is easy to say be hopeful but it seems that some are and some aren’t, for example, in situations of great stress such as concentration camps or sickness and the like, even though there may be many that are in similar conditions, some will be hopeful and look forward relief and others will give up almost immediately and go into depression. If relief comes, the positive ones will be grateful and the negative ones will think that it is as it should be.

I wonder if it is the case that positive people enjoy life more whereas negative people believe that they are entitled to things regardless of effort. Negative people also seem to be often picked on and bullied.

I also wonder if these characteristics are genetic or acquired through environmental events?

These subjects interest me in that they seem to me to be all so far fetched as to be beyond belief.

Firstly, if one accepts that the latest astrological observations are factual and that the theory of evolution is the only theory, which stands up to any sort of scrutiny, then it is impossible to believe in divine creation and the interference in life of a divine entity.

I can understand why so many people like to believe that they will have a life after death, especially when they often have such a rough trot in this life. However; life for all creatures is a matter of reacting to the various stimuli that we are faced with from day to day, these experiences make us what we are and are really the very essence of life. We are faced with such things as love, hate, ambition, satisfaction, happiness and sadness and all these things are part of living, and they are what make those that believe wish to live after death in the hope that the second time around they will get only the good things that they missed out on the first time around. One can’t imagine there being procreation in the after life so what the hell are all these second rounders going to do, to live again they will have to go through all the experiences of their first innings without the consolation of eventually dying. Doesn’t sound such an attractive outlook to me and I’m old enough to be approaching the time for this ultimate event.

Finally, the matter of eternal life, this is a horrific thought, eternity is forever, such a state is impossible to imagine. If one has eternal life then it means that one can’t die so we don’t need to breath, eat, sleep, exercise, and copulate. Taking it to its extreme we wouldn’t need a body so we would really be extinct which is dead!

Some talk of inheriting the earth but the life of the earth is finite as we know so, what happens when the earth is destroyed and taking it further, what happens when the solar system is destroyed, as we are informed it will be.

Some talk of going to heaven but where is that? We have looked some 2 billion light years into space and found only more rocks and space, so heaven must be further away than 2 billion light years. If this is the case and people saw their favourite prophet rising into heaven, it means that the prophet would have been rising at well below the speed of light so he wouldn’t probably be outside the influence of our solar system yet. As to getting to the ultimate heaven and back, the earth wouldn’t be around by the time of the return.

To me it is so stupid to worry so much about an after life when there is so much that we can do to make the life for future inhabitants of the earth so much better and all we do is waste the time we have available to us trying to amass fortunes and possessions which when we die will be squandered away by after generations.

Why can’t we try to forget all the evils of the religions and concentrate on trying to give a good life to as many peoples of the world as possible? I’m sure that if the prophets could see the outcomes of the preachings, they would regret having ever preached. They mainly preached love and co-existence yet the heads of the various religions can justify murder, suppression, torture etc., all in the name of some man made god, we have progressed but have failed to overcome our basic fears and instincts.