A pensioner’s suicide has meaning for us all.
A shocking self-immolation by a pensioner has highlighted the despair of many older people in Japan’s cities. A few minutes before Haruo Hayashizaki of Suginamihe poured petrol over himself, the 71-year-old called his landlord to say that he could not pay his rent. He had previously told his sister that he didn’t have enough money to live on, adding: ‘Do they just want us old ones to drop dead quickly?’
His despair is typical of the poverty and desperation that lies beneath the soaring ‘grey’ crime wave in Japan, which sees far more elderly people committing crimes than teenagers. When a nation whose culture has traditionally revered its elderly abandons them, it’s clear that something dangerous and significant is happening.
Euthanasia vans
And we shouldn’t fool ourselves that it couldn’t happen here; in fact, in many ways it already is. Recently Premier Christian Radio asked if I would care to comment on its live news about Katie Hopkins’s remarks that euthanasia vans should be rolled out for older people. Turns out she is a ‘TV celebrity’ who is only attracts the spotlight when she makes egregious remarks about people who are in no position to defend themselves, such as those with dementia, or migrants. Deciding that there are too many older people in the world she opined: ‘Euthanasia vans – just like ice-cream vans – would come to your home. It would all be perfectly charming. They might even have a nice little tune they’d play. I mean this genuinely.’
Too few young people
Most of the media were scathingly dismissive, but the Independent newspaper pointed the neatest finger: ‘Once again,’ its editorial said, ‘she has provided the solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.’ The problem isn’t that there are too many older people, but that there are too few younger ones. For example, various economic think-tanks have warned that British businesses are facing serious skills shortages especially at leadership levels, partly because there are too few younger entrants and those that are young often lack the necessary skills. British businesses need to nurture their older employees, they warn. In a report in 2013, Pensions Minister Steve Webb says that ‘older workers hold the key to driving our economy forward.’(1)
Even so, fears that older workers are blocking jobs for the young still surface from time to time. ‘Young, gifted and trapped’ is the headline of an editorial in the Independent (2), accompanied by an article entitled ‘Young people’s earning power “scarred” by older workers’, based on a report by the Resolution Foundation, a left-wing think tank. Their thinking seems to be based on the fallacy that there are a fixed number of jobs in the economy, which therefore must be rationed.
Budget and expectations
In the Guardian, columnist John Harris reports a similar response to the budget with its austerity measures hitting younger people harder than the elderly. He asked some older people how they viewed young people’s complaints that they are increasingly living in impossible circumstances (3). ‘We’ve all been through that, my dear,’ said 91-year-old Ursula. ‘I’ve lived in rooms in attics, and I worked till I was 70. We worked all our lives. Life is what you make it: you’ve got to go out and get it.’ Dee, 68, said, ‘When we started our married life, there was no help. No maternity pay, even. When I left work to have my first baby, I got a £25 voucher to buy some nappies and that was it. We went down from two salaries to one. Credit was impossible to come by. We couldn’t afford holidays abroad. We had second-hand furniture.’
Today’s older people built the welfare system that the younger generation takes for granted. But when the people who invested in it all their lives become frail and need help, they find themselves betrayed, said Professor John Ashton, president of the Faculty of Public Health (4).
Marginalising the elderly
According to Dr Dhrubodhi Mukherjee, a former consultant with the World Bank, marginalisation of the elderly is happening all over the world and is the result of global-isation. In India, he says, ‘Globalisation has… reduced “family” into a non-viable economic institution for the elderly by promoting urbanised social values of individualism and atomic self-interest.’
In the ageist narrative no-one seems to realise that the bell they are swinging tolls for them, too, because they will be old themselves, one day. God did not make a mistake when he planned old age, but it has been hijacked by greed and ungodliness.
Louise Morse is Media & Communications Manager for the Pilgrims’ Friend Society.
Footnotes
2 Independent, 28th July, p 2
3 http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/17/old-young-age-divide-christchurch
