Eating the Elderly

Last Friday, with my big guy doing a sleepover and the wife doing a mother-daughter overnight, it was just me and the little dude.   That night, he and I hit a restaurant, snagged some ice cream, and then together picked out the movie for the evening.  We'd initially thought we'd go with Godzilla, but he decided maybe that wasn't quite right.  And so, after much deliberation, I steered him towards Soylent Green.  It's one of the classics of sci fi, set in 2022.

Back in 1973, that seemed a ways off.  Now?  Not so much.

The film, starring a scenery-chomping Charlton Heston in all his toothy, man-slab glory, involves a detective living in a crumbling, overpopulated dystopia. Unemployment is rampant, and the vast majority of human beings are desperately poor, with a tiny minority of the wealthy controlling everything.  "The Greenhouse Effect" has turned the world into a desert-like hothouse, in which crops struggle to grow, and big corporations control the entirety of the food supply.  Most of that is now processed food.

So, yeah, total fantasy.  Nothing at all like 2012.  Nope.

The movie revolves around a murder, as Charlton finds himself trying to figure out why a muckity-muck in the Solyent corporation has been assassinated.  The answer, of course, is that he's realized that Soylent Green...the latest and last hope for the dwindling supply of protein...isn't made out of soy and plankton at all.  The seas are dying, and increasingly devoid of life.

If you haven't seen it, stop reading now.

It is, of course, reprocessed human beings, either those harvested from the streets or those who get old and volunteer to die.  Those who volunteer?  They're gently euthanized, given wine and beautiful images and music to soothe their passing.

My little guy wasn't quite sure to make of it.  "A good movie, but it's so depressing," he sighed.  "And it's not even European!"

But here's the crazy thing.  I'm not sure that the way that this horrific imagined dystopia dealt with its elderly is any less kind than the way our culture deals with the old.

As a volunteer for Meals on Wheels, I encounter the radical isolation of the old in our communities.  I take the time to talk, as much as they need, when I do deliveries of food twice a month.  What I experience is a life of closed blinds and clutter, as human beings spend the last of their days slowly fading to black.  Families are distant and distracted.  Friends are aging or dead.  Too often, it's life as a shade, as a shadow.

The Industrial Retirement Warehouses into which we put our grandparents and parents are no better.  They tend to look pretty for visiting distant family, but honestly?  That's just a whited sepulchre.  They're grim, grim places.  Some are passable, but most?  Most are devoid of the laughter of children, closed off from the sky and the air and the sun, smelling of stale flesh and antiseptic.  If this is in my future, then I'd almost rather be processed into a Tofurky.

And what to do about it?  Our consumer-cultural tendency to get us to adolescence as quickly as possible and to keep us there as long as possible means we're just not paying attention to the passing of time.  We cling to youth, blind ourselves to our own mortality, hide away from any hint of aging and dying...and then the next thing we know, we're alone in a room, estranged, confused, alone.

Fighting it seems both as necessary and hopeless as the wounded Heston's shouts as he's carried away at the end of the film, that we've got to do something, something, somehow.

Because it's made of people.  People.

The Parable of the Bad Job Creators

Once upon a time, there was a couple who ran a mid-sized business in a small town.   They just couldn't get along, and spent their days arguing about anything and everything.  Business was not good, as their workforce was dispirited and their clients were drifting away.

One day, after a particularly heated argument, one of their managers came to them and let them know that the morale had gotten so bad that most of the employees were likely going to quit.  "Our salaries have been stagnant for five years," said the manager.  "And we all hate working here.  The whole town knows how crappy it is to work here.  If you don't do something, we'll walk."

The couple went back into their office, realizing that if they didn't act, they'd lose all of their employees, and would have trouble finding new ones.  They argued quietly but productively, and then came up with a solution.

They needed to give their employees a raise.   But how?   They didn't have enough liquidity in their bank accounts, and their credit was nearly tapped out.   Suddenly, each of them had a solution.

We could take money they've contributed into the company-managed retirement fund, said she.  It's struggling anyway.

Sure, said he!

And we could also take money they've put into the charitable fund, the one we use to do giving to those two local nonprofits that provide care to the indigent elderly and the disabled and the orphans.

So long as people were getting a raise, what did it matter where it came from?  The employees would be happy.  The couple agreed.

Then, of course, they began to argue about how large the "raise" should be.  Their voices grew louder.

When the employees heard the arguing, they were angrier, and argued among themselves.

How dare they argue about the size of the raise!  It should be as big as possible!

And the couple heard them, and smiled.

The Grey Ghetto

I spent some more time today visiting with an older member of our church who's living by himself at a nearby assisted living facility. Dick has no family and can't hear, and doesn't wear hearing aids, so you've got to write things out to communicate with him. It was lower tech this time, as I had the foresight to step away from using my iPhone and just dragged along a legal pad and a big ol' Sharpie. Yeah, I was kickin' it old school, but what matters to me is what works.

When I got there, he was out of his room, so I searched around the facility and finally met up with him eating lunch. He was at a table with four other folks, but they were all...well...lost in their own worlds. They were silent, folded in on themselves.

Dick didn't even look up at first when I tapped him on the shoulder and sat down next to him. He gradually brightened as I wrote him note after note in big bold letters, writing him questions and responding to his statements. But it took a little while. He's just so used to being alone and unable to communicate that it takes a few moments for his mind to warm up to the presence of another.

It was good to fellowship with him, and I'm committed to spending more time with him in the coming months. The visit resonated interestingly off of a blog post I read yesterday about intergenerational congregations. Too many of our churches are either young or old. We've got the hipstermergents and the old grey mainliners neatly separated into different congregations. Even in the heady corporate world of the JesusMegaCenters, their immense flocks are carefully divvied up into target marketing demographics. Kids with kids. Teens with teens. Young Adults with Young Adults. The church is a very neatly and intentionally divided house.

What that means is that the church is mirroring our culture. The boundary-shattering presence of the Holy Spirit is ignored. We fail to be the place for the young to learn just how poorly our culture treats it's eldest. Our old old are warehoused, conveniently sealed away from a society that is obsessed with youth and the young. When I go by to visit, I almost never see anyone younger than me there. And I ain't young.

This is a failure on two fronts. It's the loss of the young that they haven't been taught to see value in aging, in a life fully lived and in some of the deep wisdom that that creates. We obsess over ourselves and our own lives, and in doing so, we miss out on a significant opportunity for personal growth. A society that discourages mingling of the generations is a society that condemns itself to making the same mistakes over and over again.

More significantly, the ghetto walls around the old hide away something that we all need to see. We need to see how the elderly are treated. We need to see the impacts of isolation from the broader society, and the impacts of predatory profiteering on a population that can't often assess the quality of the care they receive.

The young need to see it, because unless things change, that life we so carefully avoid because it bores us/freaks us out will be our life one day. Is this how we want to live? Is this how we treat people who we care about? If our relationships with our elders were stronger, we'd feel this. If our commitments to our elders...be they family or friends...were stronger, we'd look at how our culture treats the aging with mortal horror.

It makes both Soylent Green and Logan's Run look almost utopian.