Shortly previous to his loss of life from prostate most cancers 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, Sailing to Byzantium, by William Butler Yeats, which begins: “That is no country for old men.”
My mom, my uncle, and I have been current for the impromptu efficiency, which passed off in my father’s mattress in Washington, DC, the place he had commenced in-home hospice care after the chemotherapy remedies that had been compelled upon him by profit-oriented docs had accelerated his demise.
This was however one in all 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 beneath 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 eager to die.
I’ve no method of understanding what was going by way of my dad’s thoughts throughout that last poetic eruption, however the first line of the Yeats poem did appear to be a becoming commentary on the nation by 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 lately returned to reside within the homeland after practically eight years in Barcelona; I had flown into Washington in August from Turkey, which was one in all my common stops in a 20-year self-imposed exile.
Indeed, my father’s last months had merely confirmed that the US is “no country for old men”. Counterproductive chemotherapy remedies have been however one of many methods he had been milked for all he was price, earlier than being turned over as prey to the profitable realm of funeral and cremation providers.
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 within the United States earn in a number of months. For people 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, in fact, 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 folks change into decaying objects from which revenue should proceed to be extracted till the final minute.
According to the outcomes of a West Health-Gallup survey printed in 2022, roughly one in 4 Americans aged 65 and older and three in 10 Americans between the ages of fifty and 64 stated that they had sacrificed primary wants, resembling meals, to pay for healthcare.
The examine discovered that older ladies and Black Americans have been disproportionately affected and that punitive well being care prices constituted a big supply of stress within the each day lives of older Americans, with stress naturally solely exacerbating current 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 remedies – implies that life itself continues to be a privilege and never a proper within the United States.
Then there’s the $34bn assisted-living trade, which a current Washington Post investigation revealed to be affected by wanton neglect regardless of charging a mean of $6,000 a month per resident. Since 2018, the Post reported, greater than 2,000 residents have wandered off unnoticed from such amenities, and practically 100 of them have died after doing so.
So a lot for “assisted living”.
To make sure, the loneliness and isolation that so usually attends outdated age within the US does nothing to extend life expectancy; nor does the distinctive stigma that US “culture” attaches to ageing. As the American Psychological Association (APA) has famous, institutionalised ageism within the United States entails a “host of negative effects, for people’s physical and mental wellbeing and society as a whole”.
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 houses, and the company racket generally known as the US healthcare system.
That stated, the US is, in reality, a effective nation for some outdated males – resembling former warmongering diplomat Henry Kissinger, who perished at residence in Connecticut in November on the ripe outdated age of 100 after spending a superb a part of his life inflicting the deaths of numerous folks worldwide.
Not lengthy after my father’s loss of life in August, I fell into dialog with a Bolivian man in his 50s who had resided in Washington for greater than 20 years and who expanded on the “no country” theme. He deliberate to stay it out for an additional 10 to fifteen years earlier than returning to his residence metropolis of Cochabamba, he instructed me, as a result of he couldn’t afford to be outdated within the US.
And whereas the US could also be “no country for old men”, it’s not a lot of a rustic for anybody else, both.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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