Pass the Rocking Chair, Please

Pass the Rocking Chair, Please

WANTED ~ Baby boomers ready to enter Senior Citizen status, wishing to be left alone in a nursing home, with little to no visitation by family, poor to medium quality care from the facility by workers making $7.00 to $14.00 per hour, to pine out the last of their days on this planet in misery.

The ad above may sound like a joke but in some sense is just what we have done to the last generation of seniors for the past few decades.

Baby boomers have gone through the last couple of decades as the, 60's free love hippy children, 70's militant fight the system rebels, 80's preppie's and 90's dot.com, me for me if it feels good do it generations passed through our countries political systems and health care and senior reform systems.

Now these same Baby boomers are they themselves about to enter senior status and about to join the ranks of un-wanted and sometimes abused seniors of our country and systems.

Many if not most of us grew up watching shows like "The Waltons" where you had 3 generations of the same family living in the same house, helping and caring for each others needs.

But since the time that the show went off the air our society changed. The mind-set became one of "Well (mom or dad) has become a burden, our lives are too busy to care for them, lets just stick them in a nursing home." The me for me generation and mind-set started and we became a generation of forgetting about our elderly.

I say this because last October, I had to go to one of our local nursing homes on some community business. While I was there waiting for my appointment with the director, I had an elderly man approach me. He asked me several times if I was his son and each time I assured him I was not. Finally he asked if we could just sit and talk and I said yes and he had some wonderful stories from his life.

When I was finally called away to my meeting with the director, I asked her what was the elderly mans story and she said that he had been dropped off 9 years ago, had his bill paid regularly every month on time but had not had a visitor in the 9 years since he had been dropped off.