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I’ve seen this several times in Florida (retirement capitol of the US). Often times it’s couples trying to drive around doing deliveries. They don’t even know what a GPS is so they take forever and a day. But then they finally arrive and your anger turns to sorrow when you see these frail old people just trying to survive.
This is going to be even worse if/when Musk and trump dismantle Social Security. The adult middle class will collapse entirely when their seniors will lose their homes and food, and their children are still at home because they can’t afford to live on their own.
Couple this with smaller family sizes, this could mean two single child adults might have to support four living senior citizens (both sets of parents) while also raising children of their own.
This is called the sandwich generation (when you have to take care of both adults and kids on your own). It’s a thing!
Yeah, my mom grew up in a house with her parents and a grandparent of two. And her cousin. That was the 60s and 70s. Guess we’re bringing it back!
I fucking feel this.
I’m in a situation where in my family I’m the one who’s going to be taking care of my parents as they get older because my only sibling (older) is entirely unreliable and financially unstable.
Then my fiance is ALSO being expected to take up that responsibility because all her siblings went and had 2-4 kids and “can’t afford” or “won’t have time” to help take care of her mother who is already aging.
So we’re having to plan ahead as 25 and 30 year olds to be able to help and support 3 elders. This basically defaults us to not being able to have kids.
My girlfriend is taking care of her parents with her father having a couple of weeks to live and her mother being so anxious that she can’t be trusted to take care of him (give him morphine, start preparing a second dose thinking she didn’t give him his dose yet, change his fentanyl patch and doesn’t remove the old one)… Her sisters are pretty much nowhere to be found, as if their boyfriends were unable to take care of the kids for one fucking evening.
They’ll let their father die a painful death without seeing him, but at least they will have enjoyed the last few days of the ski season!
Fuck thats grim. I assume home nursing is not a financial possibility? I’m really sorry to hear about yours and hers situation.
Then my fiance is ALSO being expected to take up that responsibility because all her siblings went and had 2-4 kids and “can’t afford” or “won’t have time” to help take care of her mother who is already aging.
Your fiance’s siblings are stupid for turning down the free live-in childcare.
An elderly person verging on disabled and one day probably will be, also with what looks like developing early onset dementia probably doesn’t make for good childcare
Or like, you could just have kids. Don’t Darwin yourself over the stupidity of others
you don’t understand how fucking expensive children are i guess.
You are very optimist people will still have kids in this situation.
pregnancy prevention is expensive and abortions are becoming illegal i think we’ll see more kids
Romania tried that already. Decree 770. There was a bump in number if children. After that, pregnant women and childbed mortality went up, kids were neglected or dumped in orphanages. In the end birth rate dropped anyway.
Also a lot of people who are against taking away choice from society don’t consider abortion an option for themselves personally. There will always be accidental pregnancies that result in children that people struggle to afford to feed, house and care for.
“Couldn’t even tip I was so upset”
Haha I was going to comment the same thing. Delivery took too long 🤣
For the OGs here, this is what George W. Bush would call “uniquely American” with pride. The rest of us…not so much pride.
We are into shit stage capitalism.
As if there was ever a time where there wasn’t someone who was too old working to earn some money. United States has never properly taken care of its populace why are we pretending that they used to.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
Sorry this is weak, even for armchair activism.
I can totally believe it. There’s an old guy at my job too and it’s manual labor
Hurry up nan me foods gettin cold
I’d blame a lot of this on the destruction of our communal living patterns. We used to live in extended family groups. It was reasonable and expected to live with your parents and siblings. If you did leave the family home it often was just to build a home on the same property.
But then the idea of the nuclear family was popularized, probably to make more money and sell house, and here we are.
To be clear since what I said has been immediately misinterpreted, family centric living patterns were torn apart by capitalism. It heavily favors capitalism when we are separated from each other and lose community. This wasn’t a benign social shift
This is nonsense.
In Western/Central Europe and Scandinavia, smaller families are the norm, yet nobody sees 80 year old people working.
This is entirely the fault of unchained capitalism, corruption and half a century of lobbying against the working class.
Let’s not be unreasonable, there can be multiple causes and multiple solutions.
Those countries also used to have a more communal structure amongst families and that still was dismantled.
But they actually implemented social programs and living wages making it not an issue.
Also yes it is capitalism fault. It all is, including the dismantling of our communities to favor more isolated living. It’s design to separate us and disempower the worker.
We have something called pensions.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you.
But I still don’t want to live with my narcissistic MAGA parents, so…evidently things have gone really far sideways and it’ll be hard to rebuild that social fabric.
Honestly same. I haven’t spoken with my dad in months thanks to his MAGA views. I blame this “fuck you I got mine” as a result of community destruction
Isolation must decrease empathy for others. Being around the same group of other people a lot increases your empathy for them, which makes it harder to hurt them. We don’t have that failsafe anymore.
More productive generating more money than ever before.
Take solace in the idea that, statistically, she likely voted for Trump.
Go fuck yourself. Anyone mocking the suffering of someone is human garbage
In Germany there was/still is this scam happening, called “Enekltrick”, where people (mostly men) impersonate grandchildren to get into the pockets of the elderly, and a rap group made a song about it.
The refrain goes
That’s the grandchild scam
We’re taking your grandma’s pension away
She won’t even notice, she’s too senile
She can give us something, she doesn’t need much anyway
Ohh, that’s the grandchild scam
We’re taking your grandma’s pension away
And for political reasons, that’s okay
Your grandma probably voted for Hitler back then anyway
I think in that context I kinda get the resentment but if you really wish for someone to suffer as idk some kind of punishment, that’s pretty fucked up
Go on… Tell me more about these statistics. Did elder women have over a 50% chance of voting for Trump, or am I gonna see goalposts move?
