Respect and Care

I'm reading this book right now called Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I just finished a section that deals with the story of a man accidentally being held against his will in a nursing home. This section really made me think about the way we treat older people in our society. We don't have enough respect for them, honestly. I think it's horrible that we just ship them off to live in a home when they get so old that we don't want to deal with them anymore. Maybe it's just the empathetic side of me, but I always think when I read stories like this, what if that happened to me? I certainly don't want to be the person to do that to my parents. Now I understand that there are cases where illness makes it so a person needs to be looked after, but there are a lot of people who are forced by their children to live in nursing homes despite the fact that they suffer from no illness. We live in an out of sight out of mind world, and I think we try to "dispose" of our elderly in a way that makes us feel good about ourselves. One of the characters in the book puts it best:

"We--by whom I mean anyone over sixty--commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight." 

I don't think anyone could have explained the world's treatment of the elderly better.