Report
Warning Sign-Herbert Mujica Rojas
23-3-2023
Silent tragedy in the world
With the title Passive Euthanasia, Aura Lucía Mera in the Colombian newspaper El Espectador put on the table a soundless debacle that is spreading worldwide. And she does it masterfully.
A 78-year-old woman wrote to El País in Spain:
“I know and totally disapprove of the passive euthanasia that has been implemented and is carried out every day with the elderly. Passive euthanasia is that we have to make an appointment for everything. Passive euthanasia is that we try to request that appointment by phone and a machine answers us. Passive euthanasia is being run over by talking like machine guns or pushing supermarket checkouts without giving you time to put the products in the bags. Passive euthanasia is that they recommend that you go to a child or grandchild to do for you what you do not understand or are not capable of doing.
Some unavoidable considerations and very well described in the aforementioned text:
-If you are a senior, a woman and a widow, you are an invisible woman, you do not exist”. “[Hay que] produce or die, the exaltation of young people for the fact of producing. If you are young we use you and if you are senior we don’t care about you.
-Passive euthanasia does not contemplate lethal injection, but penetrates the soul every day. It is the heartbreak of those closest to you when age begins to take its toll on autonomy, with the loss of physical and mental faculties;
-In identity, when the older person is no longer current or like when they were young, and in belonging, when many of the people in their circle of friends are dying and they become increasingly isolated, limited in their social relationships.
-The old are dying inside of heartbreak, indifference, loneliness. These sudden retirements after a certain age are often emotional mutilations. The very label of “retired” predisposes to distancing.
-Nobody is looking for him in the job market anymore and he doesn’t know how to start living in this new “style” of being healthy and strong on the inside, but discriminated against on the outside.
-If he is a man and falls in love with someone else, he is branded as a dirty old man. If he is a woman, then the epithets are worse, he is no longer for those trots. If old people participate in a young people’s conversation, nobody listens because “they are gaga or crazy”.
-The health system does not want to spend money on costly exams, because “why”, and they throw old people around from one place to another while they have just gotten sick and, if they are lucky, die quickly, so that they do not continue screwing over the family or anyone.
-It happens in Spain, in Japan, in Colombia, in Conchinchina. More than being human, they begin to see you as a danger. “How come he still goes to the gym?”, “How can he think of continuing to drive a car?”, “Does he dare to wear a bathing suit?”, “And that look of colors at his age?”
-Men and women in full power are experiencing an overdose of loneliness and that is becoming noticeable in the eyes that are increasingly lost on the horizon, because living in solitude is bad living.
Formidable lines from the Colombian colleague that could hardly be written better, hence the tribute in review.
Have we not seen the elderly in silence, looking at a strange world in which everyone lives more aware of the cell phone than of the conversation?
And it’s rare to find good manners, and when it does happen, it’s even rarer to take kindness. It happened to me in a minibus when a young man, noticing my sling and my gray hair, gave me the seat that I hesitated for a minute to take.
At a bank they made me line up for Preferential and when I got to the counter, the lady told me: you’re not old enough for this line! Needless to say, I glared at her.
This silent pandemic, passive euthanasia, is one of the great threats to all those in the nadir of their lives.
There are countries that venerate the elderly because they are equivalent to wisdom, a traveled path, a voice of experience. Dawn and dusk are complementary, dissociation is idle and imposed by a metallic society.
Is there a reasonable reason to make the farewell more painful when there is still vigor, effort, enthusiasm, elan to continue living?
