Symbolic

This sad story from James Kirkpatrick at VDare could be seen as symbolic of what is happening to old America. An 89-year-old WWII veteran died in a so-called ‘health care’ facility, calling for help, unable to breathe. A supposed ‘nurse’ of the Diverse persuasion laughs, and this after a half-hearted attempt  at giving CPR to the dying man.

Will this ‘nurse’ still have a job after this incident? In a just and sane world, she would not, and probably would never have been employed in such a position, but thanks to some people’s guilt over ”racial injustices”, we are compelled to employ unqualified people because “justice” or something. So the negligent  and heartless employee will likely keep her job or be hired at another such job by another such facility.

Kirkpatrick in his VDare report asks rhetorically whether WWII was worth it, in light of incidents like this one. Yes, I get that the question is half-ironic, but it is a popular attitude now,  and it is often used as a pretext for condemning the ‘Greatest Generation’ or the WWII generation, as being ‘stupid’ for not refusing to fight, or as being willing dupes of the Powers-that-Be in a war that, according to some, should not have been fought. So some blame and deride the generation who fought.

Hindsight is always 20/20, and it’s not valid to blame the people of that era, the average citizens. They grew up and lived in an America which, contrary to Hollywood revisionism, was in fact a pretty good place, with a mostly decent, upright citizenry. People trusted their neighbors, and they trusted our government for the most part. Today’s cynics have a jaundiced view not only of the country of our birth but of the world generally, in a way that most people of that day could not have comprehended. It isn’t just to judge them harshly for their attitudes; they lived in a world that is foreign to today’s Americans, especially the younger ones who never knew the old America, and have no clue. The WWII generation did what they thought right in light of what they knew of the world. What else could they have done? They had no crystal ball in which to foresee the dystopian changeling America in which they would end their days, much less to judge in advance that refusing to fight would be the way to produce an ideal outcome, as today’s generations believe they should have done.

The world is complex; there is no way we can imagine what the outcome could have been, had the war not been fought, given that there are so many variables.

This poor veteran’s life ended perhaps sooner than it might have, had he got good medical and nursing care. The tragedy is that there will be many more helpless elderly dying under conditions similar to this, and what’s being done about it? Nothing, as far as I can tell, except policies that will only worsen the situation: more and more uncontrolled immigration from backward countries, ‘nursing homes’ employing uneducated, untrained employees with likely no experience in such work, and little to no English skills in many cases. This is a crime, and it should not be allowed to continue, but in a world in which unscrupulous, cheap employers hire unqualified and callous people to ‘care’ for the sick and old, nothing good can come of it.

When will the employers as well as the callous employees be held to account?

Someone has said that the way a society treats its weakest and most vulnerable members, such as children, the old, and the sick, is a measure of how civilized it is. By that measure we don’t rate very highly.

Now I am counting down to the first post I read on the Internet in which some callous person says the older generations ‘deserve‘ to die at the hands of abusive third-world ‘medical’ workers because they were so ‘stupid’ as to let our country go to the dogs. I’ve read many, many such comments in the last year or so and it still makes me irate, especially as these hard-hearted remarks go unchallenged, virtually every. single. time.

Silence gives consent.

If only these cynics were brave enough to direct all their anger and bitterness towards somebody other than the old and weak, towards external enemies rather than their own folk, the America we live in would not be in such deep trouble.

Let this veteran and his generation pass on in peace, rather than using his death as an excuse to criticize all those, like him, who lived in a very different time.