Perhaps we need a Coronavirus Serious Pictures thread?
My mum has about the same attitude as the lady in the picture. Young people (and that includes politicians in their 40s) have absolutely no understanding that the elderly do not have the same life concerns as they do themselves, and therefore reject “it’s all for your own good” lockdowns and isolation. They are far more interested in the quality and depth of their family relationships and have little or no interest in arbitrarily prolonging their lives.
Don’t understand your point, or possibly you’ve misunderstood mine. What does empathy have to do with it? I was merely pointing out that (a) old people do not think like younger people and (b) they have similar concerns by virtue of being old.
Let’s try a little experiment in empathy. Imagine that you know, with 90% certainty, that you’ll be dead in the next 5 years regardless. What are you going to do with those years? Will you be content to sit inside your house for one or two of them, separated from your children and relatives, because the government is worried that you might, um, die within the next 5 years?
Remember also that theirs is the generation who lived with bombs dropping around their houses. They faced risk, and died, and grieved, so that our generation could sit on the couch, getting so fat and ill that a dose of the sniffles puts us in the ER. I think they’re entitled to a little “selfishness”.
I have no trouble understanding the concept of X. I was not commenting on X or the fact that your mother thinks X. I was commenting on the way you effectively said my mother thinks X, ergo Old People think X, period. It’s exactly the same thing you do with Poor People.
So your mum thinks X, and that’s fine. All the old people I’ve spoken with recently think Y, and that’s also fine. yyy supports freedom of thought. But you don’t hear me saying Old People think Y.
It’s like so many people in 2016 thought: I don’t know anyone who would vote for Trump, so obviously no-one’s going to vote for him.
Or, to take a more extreme example, it’s like those Italian brats in the 70’s who murdered a complete stranger for the of it and then said in their defense, we didn’t know her, so we figured no-one else knew her either.
That isn’t what I said. I added some other stuff to elucidate. You really need to get out of the lawyerish habit of saying “Aha! So what you really mean is …”
If you disagree with my assertion that someone who has only 5 years to live has different life concerns compared to someone with 40 years to live, please explain why that might be so.
No, it isn’t. My position is : All poor people do X, Y and Z. Since behaviours X, Y and Z have no possible outcome except poverty, all people who do X, Y and Z are poor.
Ah, good old-fashioned non-judgementalism. Nothing is right or wrong, good or bad, true or false, not even to a ballpark approximation. Every opinion is equally valid.
I have absolutely no idea how this is remotely relevant.
Okay, you didn’t explicitly say it was because of your mother, but that’s how I read it. My humblest apologies if you actually based it on a survey of your mother plus her friends who are all in the same bridge league or whatever.
As I said, it’s not about whether your mum is right or wrong. It’s about your sweeping statement of what “the elderly” think.
(If you really can’t think of any legitimate reasons for old people to care about their lifespans, I don’t know where to start anyway.)
To be precise…
You really don’t see the similarity there?
Of course not every opinion is equally valid. The point (here) of not proclaiming one opinion better than another is that whether I think your mum’s opinion or some other senior’s opinion is better per se has no bearing on whether or not either of them qualifies as representative of Old People.
Again, this isn’t what I said. Put yourself in their shoes. They have a different hierarchy of priorities. And I think the priorities of other people are starting to change too: they’re starting to realise that life is not all about accumulating more stuff, that their relationships are far more important than they imagined, and that their nihilistic and empty lives aren’t necessarily as valuable as they thought. I’ve noticed that a lot of people are desperately afraid of dying of COVID-19 precisely because they’ve wasted their lives away doing stupid shit, and want to make up for it.
It’s a fair cop guv
Even so, you haven’t managed to refute my position in either case.
While it might or might not be how the elderly think: unless it’s possible to sign some sort of contract that says that they do not require any type of care if they would get sick, it just doesn’t seem feasible to me. They would clog up the hospitals and use (up) whatever resources that are required in these situations. And then some elderly who do care about their lifespan, might not be able to get care.
…but from the backlash against this recent “modest proposal”, I think we can infer that neither of those would be acceptable (in case it wasn’t already obvious).
As the effects of isolation for our elders here in Sweden are starting to show now, the restrictions are lifted or will be lifted shortly. I hope they are asked to proceed with caution, would be nice if there was an okish middle ground to be found.
But there isn’t, is there? What drives me nuts about the whole COVID-19 debacle is that the politicians still believe that there is a solution, some best of all possible worlds. But no such thing exists. You either cower in your room under the bedsheet and hope it goes away, or you take your chances with Life. Those are the only two options. Yes, masks, handwashing etc will reduce the probability of catching the disease (and might possibly have something to do with reduced severity). But they’re not even close to foolproof. Nor, funnily enough, is cowering in your room: most of the deaths among the elderly in the UK occurred in care homes.
That’s why I wrote “okish middle ground”. For example, I guess the majority of our (Swedish) elders (who live on their own) will keep doing their grocery shopping online or have friends/neighbours help them out. In general try to stay away from crowded places but meet a selected few of their loved ones and do the handwashing etc.
You either stay on the sidewalk, or walk down the middle of the highway with a plastic bag on your head, taking your chances with Life. Those are the only two options.
of it and then said in their defense, we didn’t know her, so we figured no-one else knew her either.
