Have You Exceeded Your Best-before Date?

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A good article posted on the Ode2old blog on Tuesday. Give it a read. I found it quite inspiring.

Many of us have been or will be taking care of our aging parents. Some of us are wondering who’s going to take care of us.

The attitudes prevalent in the western world today about care of the old and infirm is really quite an anomaly. Through-out history the general expectation has been that the weak stay with the family. Most of them were care-givers and providers at one time and now it is their time to receive. We’ve traded that model for another and I don’t think ours is better in any way. We’ve just gotten used to it.

One aspect of that model is the ideal we have of one generation to one household rather than several generations under the same roof. Maybe that is just a result of other forces at work in society. Whatever the case, it is certainly true that living in isolation (we call it being independent or self-sufficient) is held up as a virtue. Could that be propaganda promoted by capitalist society to make us feel good about being interchangable cogs in the big machine? Nah. Whichever way you slice it, though, the idea is pure marketing genius.

In a lot of ways, our attitudes toward people are just another side of our attitudes towards our material goods, a kind of cheap, bean-counter mentality based solely on cost-benefit analysis. If it costs more to repair than to replace, junk it. Another aspect of this is replacing a perfectly fine unit just because a newer model has been introduced.

Our western attitudes could also stem from a loss of spirituality in our society. There is still plenty of religiosity at large, but that is not the same thing as spirituality.

Or, maybe our situation is caused by the fact that we are not a classless society, but a one class society, and that is the merchant class. The stratification into lower, upper and middle class simply reflects relative success in the game, measured solely in terms of dollars amassed. If we had different classes there would be fundamentally different values underlying each one. Each would have its own mythology and a unique way of looking at the world. We only seem to have one: get rich or die tryin‘.

Posted by: swampy | 10-02-2008 | 01:10 PM
Posted in: Uncategorized