Stairway to Heaven

Whenever a scandal arises in relation to a nursing home, especially when accompanied by outrage on the airwaves over the treatment of ‘mammy’ or ‘daddy’, I generally find myself asking, ‘Well, what else did you expect?’

Nursing homes are basically a form of long (or sometimes mercifully short)-term parking for the inconvenient elderly.  Outside of the public sector, which is generally a cut above the rest, they are purely money-making ventures, staffed at ground level mainly by people on minimum wage, who, unless they are especially caring—and such individuals do exist—are not, rationally speaking, likely to put themselves out beyond the minimum.  Though the reported level of staffing in some of these places might tend to make even that minimum problematical.

Now nursing homes do tend to put up a brave front when you first visit them, but that is more for relatives than residents, a way of helping the former salve their consciences.  ‘Oh, she’s in the right place, after all!’ . . . ‘He’ll be grand there!’ etc. etc.

There’s a film that appears now and again on TV, with Billy Connolly and a cast of various ‘national treasures’, called Quartet, about a nursing home for retired musicians, which is presented in such appealing detail that I’d be almost tempted to dig out my didgeridoo go there myself.  But, of course, it is pure fantasy.  It bears the same relationship to the general run of such establishments as The Quiet Man does to, say, modern-day Moyross.

The bottom line is that, even if you really do care about your elderly relatives, you have to accept—medical needs aside—that putting them into a home must of necessity involve a certain diminution of standards.  Really, I’d go as far as to say that you really don’t have a right to expect more than the bare minimum.  Arses wiped when their supposed to be wiped, meals delivered on time, a basic level of medical oversight, no gratuitous ill-treatment etc. etc.  I really do think that if you get that, then you’re probably doing relatively well.

Of course, the second question I tend to ask when confronted on-screen by often overreacting relatives is, ‘How come, if you are so concerned about the treatment of your elderly, you don’t look after them yourselves?’

But then that is quite an easy one to answer in many, if not in all, cases.

To the extent that modern society has made the family slave to the machine, rather than the other way around, it has made any other option almost impossible.  Who is expected to do the caring in a society when most people have an economic gun to their head compelling them to work outside the home?  And what of the micky mouse nature of modern house design, with third bedrooms—even where they have third bedrooms—indistinguishable from cupboards?

In Treblinka, there was a chute that led to the gas chambers.  It was jokingly called the ‘Roadway to Heaven’.  And once you were in it there was no way out of it, and one’s fate was fixed.  And really I think that modern society and the forces of modern society—the governments and the banks and the pressure groups and the ideologies and the various opinion-forming mediums—are intent on pushing us into a chute of their own creating.

The thing that unites all the various popular and luvvie causes that infest the world at the moment and the various liberal and left influenced political movements is that they are all made up predominantly of people—and often the same people—who have a passion to micro-manage everyone else’s life: what you say, how you dress, what you eat, your beliefs, your thoughts—the machinery is already there that makes that possible—and so on etc.etc.

Of course, it is for your own good; it is always for our own good.  The funny thing is historically how the restrictions placed on populations rarely apply to the controllers themselves.

They tend, at least in terms of the modern variety, to be far too bohemian for that . . .