Showing posts with label elderly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label elderly. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Culture vs. anticulture



It reflects what it means to be human, what it means to love.
It calls us to be fully ourselves -- or at least our best selves.
It touches the heart as it engages the mind.
For a moment, it's as if we can see the face of God . . .
and we are shattered, for who can withstand the divine?

This is who we are. Or should be.



This is anticulture.

It reflects the deviant and devolved of our society.
It is ugly. It is banal. It celebrates urges detached
from both love and reason. It is less than human . . .
and barely more than animal -- if that.

What this tells us about humanity, we don't want to hear.
Looking at Miley Cyrus throughout this silly dispatch
from Dante's Inferno, the word "estrus" comes to mind.
This child who (I presume) was born human . . . 
well, she's presenting like an orangutan.

This is who we are. But shouldn't be.
This will not end well, though end it will.

Kyrie eleison. (But not on Robin Thicke.)

Sunday, May 05, 2013

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Madea for bus monitor!


You know who we need to be a junior-high bus monitor? Madea.

Surely, there must be some real-life approximations of Mabel "Madea" Simmons who can be tasked with straightening out America's feral youth. Give the newly minted monitors a school-bus version of a 007 license so the po-po will leave them the hell alone to do what needs to be done.

Can I get a witness, y'all?

Friday, June 22, 2012

The feral youth of Bus 784


Here's what I think of this Not Safe for Work video that's gone viral around the world, thanks to YouTube.

Here's what I think of little smart-ass, bullying seventh-grade s***s who pick on a 68-year-old grandma, who also happens to be the monitor on Bus 784 in Greece, N.Y.

Here's what I think. Here goes.

Do you remember those little bitty baseball bats common back in the day?

In my youth in the segregated South, they had a common name (common in every sense of the word) I shall not repeat, but I suspect sons and daughters of the Deep South know exactly what I'm talking about.


ANYWAY, this is why God invented those. (And your old man's thin leather belt.) I suspect just nearly connecting with one of the little darlings with a billy club-size Louisville Slugger would have been sufficient to put the fear -- if not of God -- of serious bodily harm into their profoundly undeveloped little brains.

Unfortunately, if the poor woman had done what most any adult would have done when I was a kid, she would have been arrested, and then she would have been sued into pauperism by the wolves who obviously have been "raising" these little monsters. That's because brats like that don't come from nowhere.

There is almost no reason sufficient to administer a serious ass-whipping to a child. Almost. But this is a damn good one.

This kind of behavior toward a senior citizen by a child used to be unthinkable, especially in the South of my youth, unless you were talking about a serious juvenile delinquent who'd be penitentiary bound soon enough. There were reasons for that.

Someone needs to exercise "the nuclear option" against the whole lot of these feral youth on that bus. Now.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Then there was music and wonderful roses

Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
I've read, that things inanimate have mov'd,
And, as with living Souls, have been inform'd,
By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound.
What then am I? Am I more senseless grown
Than Trees, or Flint? O force of constant Woe!
'Tis not in Harmony to calm my Griefs.
Anselmo sleeps, and is at Peace; last Night
The silent Tomb receiv'd the good Old King;
He and his Sorrows now are safely lodg'd
Within its cold, but hospitable Bosom.
Why am not I at Peace?

-- William Congreve,
The Mourning Bride (1697)

Monday, April 18, 2011

One of these things is not like the others


It never fails. When you see a bunch of vinyl at an estate sale, it falls into two categories.

You have the now-elderly (or dead) parents' music. All this stuff dates from the '40s, '50s and '60s, along with a smattering of later "remember when" types of long-playing offerings.

This stack is chockablock with Lawrence Welk and Mitch Miller offerings, usually, but if you're lucky, there'll also be lots of jazz. Particularly Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett.

Or, in this case, a bit of "Late Music" -- purchased by Mom and Dad sometime around 1957, based on the LPs Columbia was hawking on the inner sleeve.



THEN YOU HAVE the stack comprised of the now-elderly (or dead) parents' kids' music, which for one reason or another was left with Mom and Dad to serve as both a source of parental confusion ("Are Johnny and Jill going to pick up their record albums, dear? They've been here 30 years now!") and an eternal middle finger to the folks' bourgeois staidness, as befitted their leading roles as Unhip Conformist Tools of the Fascist Establishment.

The beauty of a complete and total geek such as myself is that I buy from both piles of albums, thereby giving the middle finger of cultural revolt to both sets of conformist tools of the Establishment repression.

In other words, I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll, but now she's just my melancholy baby.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

HoJo's: It's not just for vacations anymore


We may be devo, but at least we're not all the way back to "primitive South American tribe."

Yet.

But when we get there, by God, you'll see it in Florida first. And
WFTV in Orlando will be there to report on it:
Investigators in Seminole County say they've discovered a bizarre problem: adult children are dropping off their elderly parents at hotels and motels, and abandoning them.

"A lot of the local hotels seem to be getting seniors that are just dropped off by their kids," said Officer Zach Hudson of the Lake Mary Police Department.

One man was left at the La Quinta Inn in Lake Mary for several weeks.

"Two different times he fell out of his bed during the midnight shift. We didn't know about it. We had people call up, saying there's a gentleman in this room, he's screaming for help," said Chris Loker of La Quinta Inn.

The problem comes down to money.

"A lot of these nursing homes are too expensive for the kids, much less their elderly parents," Hudson said.

Part of the problem is the hotels and motels are neither trained nor equipped to take on the elderly people, especially since some of the senior citizens have medical issues that require medical treatment.

But, Officer Hudson told WFTV, when parents are left at the hotels to fend for themselves no crime has been committed.
I GUESS dumping Pops at Disney World would be cost prohibitive, huh?

Even the Terroriss Muslins (
copyright pending, Tea Party Patriots) over there in Saudi Arabia have the decency to dump their parents at actual hospitals, according to this 2005 Arab News story:
Some elderly Saudis are being disposed of by their families who dump them off in front of area hospitals and speed away, leaving doctors furious and flabbergasted by this bizarre, cruel behavior.

Recently, three separate families abandoned their parents — and their responsibilities — at King Fahd Hospital.

In an incident at the hospital on Tuesday, a woman in her late 80s who was abandoned by her son there 10 days earlier was reunited with him. During her hospital stay, officials tried several times to get in touch with her family, who denied her existence.

Security guards were able to trace her taxi-driver son who ditched her at the hospital. He was recognized as a regular visitor to the premises, frequently dropping off passengers at the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) entrance.

The man arrived at the hospital accompanied by his young son, and when confronted by hospital officials he denied any relation to the old woman despite her enthusiastic greetings.

“Waleed,” she cried.

“After checking the man’s ID we established that, in fact, it was his name,” said the Dr. Abdul Malik Al-Huti, head of the ICU.

If there was any doubt, the little boy put it to rest.

“When we brought in the young child accompanying his father, he took one look at her and said she was his grandmother.”

After officials had a long, generally unpleasant discussion with “Waleed,” he reclaimed his mom.
A DOCTOR there was nonplussed by the whole thing.

“This phenomenon of abandonment by families of their elders is new in our community,” he said at the time, “and it is unacceptable to the majority of Saudi society.”

But that's just because the Terroriss Muslins (copyright pending, Newt Gingrich) ain't advanced like we are. Then again, I'll bet it won't be long before we concede that the Aché tribe in Paraguay has a point (and not just that at the end of a spear).

"The idea that it’s human nature for parents to make sacrifices for their children and, in turn, for their grown children to sacrifice for their aging parents — turns out to be a 'naïve expectation,'" geography and physiology professor Jared Diamond told
UCLA Today in January.
This assumption, he said, ignores undeniable conflicts of interest between generations.

From a common sense perspective, “Parents and children both want a comfortable life — there are limits to the sacrifices that they’ll make for each other.” And from a scientific perspective — natural selection — Diamond noted, “It may under some circumstances be better for children to abandon or kill their parents and for the parents to abandon or kill their children.”

Those circumstances include life’s often heart-wrenching realities — from the threat of starvation among indigenous tribes to the difficult choices posed by modern societies’ life-prolonging medical care, Diamond said.

Traditional nomadic tribes often end up abandoning their elderly during their unrelenting travels. The choice for the healthy and young is to do this or carry the old and infirm on their backs — along with children, weapons and necessities — through perilous territory. Also prone to sacrificing their elderly are societies that suffer periodic famines. Citing a dramatic example, Diamond said Paraguay’s Aché Indians assign certain young men the task of killing old people with an ax or spear, or burying them alive.

“We react with horror at these stories, but upon reflection, what else could they do?” Diamond asked. “The people in these societies are faced with a cruel choice.”

Those of us in modern cultures face cruel choices of our own, he added. “Many of you have already faced or will face a similar ordeal when you are the relative responsible for the medical care of an old person — the one who has to decide whether to halt further medical intervention or whether to administer painkillers and sedatives that will have the side effect of hastening death.”
YEAH, we all certainly make our choices. And they often are cruel.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

The Curse of Homer Simpson be upon them

Instead of hounding preachers who criticize the gay-rights agenda and publishers who speak out against the Great White Jihad, why don't Canada's human-rights tribunals attend to some real violations of inalienable rights?

We're talking As Bad as It Gets, here.

FOR INSTANCE, this unspeakable horror perpetrated against the elderly, as reported by Reuters:
Beer maker Molson is turning off the tap and cutting off the supply of free suds to its retirees, the Toronto Star reported on Tuesday.

Molson, a division of Molson Coors, said it was looking to "standardize" its complimentary beer policy.

There are 2,400 Molson retirees in Canada and their free beer costs the company about C$1 million ($900,000) a year, the Star said.

Molson retirees in the province of Newfoundland will see their monthly allotment of beer fall from six dozen a month to zero over the next five years.
IF THIS ISN'T awful enough on its own merit -- in my opinion, far worse than anything right-winger Mark Steyn may have had to say about the booze-hating Mahometans in Maclean's newsweekly -- let me add this in hopes of prodding the Canadians into action.

Read carefully: Molson Coors is half-owned by Americans, who no doubt have, with imperial malice, exerted malign influence over their Dominion partners.


Now go get 'em, eh?