Perhaps it'd be better if they just killed themselves

CW:  Death, questionable medical practices 

The nursing home lies along a major road, opposite a vocational training school.  It sits, fenced off from all sides but a locked rear entrance, and a small out-of-the-way front entrance.  The front entrance itself is tucked away in a path running between the nursing home and an adjacent residential building.  

Once you find the opening in the fence, you're greeted by a small patch of lawn, and some hedges, with cigarette butts lining the ground.  This area doubles as the smoking area, frequented predominantly by residents with schizophrenia.  This is, of course, because psychiatrists do a poor job of reducing the usage of such recreational drugs.  

On the way into the nursing home proper, you get a peek into the home's common area.  Naturally, the mornings start too early for there to be any residents there, but when you tail it for home at the end of your shift, you get to see an assortment of them staring blankly at a television screen.  

When you enter the nursing home proper, you must sign in at an ipad.  The ipad is the only static constant in the home - the storerooms may run out of dressing or medication, blood pressure machines may remain uncalibrated, the coffee machine may run out of hot chocolate, but the ipad will always work.  There's a thermometer beside it - invariably, it measures a low temperature - after all, you had to wait for a bus for half an hour at 6 am.

You'd rock up to a handover - the night shift nurse will run off her resident list, and you'd get ready for day.  If you're lucky, the residents won't have started to yell by then.

If you're unlucky, then you'd hear shouts for help propelling themselves towards the nurses station.  It would always be the same resident.  A frail old lady.  Italian.  Dementia.  Osteoarthritis.  She'd shout "help me", her voice drawing it out into a wail.  One of the assistants in nursing would see to her.  You'd give her a shot of antipsychotics later that day.  It doesn't help.  It won't help.  But you do it anyways because that's what the nurses told you to do, and the nurses tell you to do it because the doctors charted it and the doctors chart it because they each have to look after twenty residents in the facility.

You start off the day proper with blood sugars.  There's this lady, Greek, you think.  She's sleeping when you start your rounds - it's barely 7 after all - but all the same you have do your job.  You call out her name.  She doesn't respond.  You turn up the lights.  She doesn't respond.  You tell her you're going to give her a small jab, that it won't take long.  No response.

So you pull her arm out to expose her hand.  She tells you it's cold.  You apologise.  You unsheathe the lancet, and place it on her index finger.  She tells you it hurts, she moves her hand wildly.  You keep the lancet there, and you draw blood.  She yells out about the pain.  You tell her the painful part's over, you load the blood onto the strip, and you put a tissue on the wound.  You thank her.

You dim the lights, leave the room, and close the door.  5 more to go.

***

The hallmark of modern colonialism, now that it's mostly out of fashion for countries to just rock up and subjugate an entire peoples, is the transfer of resources from the global south to the north.

The most obvious method is the transfer of literal, physical material - blood diamond mines in Central Africa, nickel from Indonesia, to more processed and manufactured goods from China and India.  

These, by and large, are temporary.  One day, those mines will be tapped dry, or at least dry enough to a point where they're no longer economical.  Perhaps one day, the productive economies of the formerly designated second world countries will shift to a service economy, with their factories being left to rot away.

More intransient is the exploitation of bodies - for as long as people reproduce, as long as people continue to exist, their flesh and labour can be used to benefit the global north.  Lithium and nickel can run dry, but as long as man draws breath, value can be drawn from his body.  

This is most evident in the practice of immigrant labour - in the past, through direct slavery, whereby the European powers created markets for slave trade on a global scale.  And whilst through violent and civil struggle, from Haiti to America, overt slavery, legal slavery has supposedly vanished, it still persists through the form of illegal slave trades and prison labour.

Yet still, in a more local context, Australia, slaves were kidnapped from the South Sea Islands to work in our sugar canes (1).  By 1906, we ostensibly deported them to whence they came, with little regard for such consequences of their past internment.  This is a recurring theme of the exploitation of labour - people and their bodies become disposable, akin to plastics to be tossed away.

Still, it is not as if such labour practices ended there.  In recent years, Australia has been hiring Pacific Islanders to work in our hospitality industries (2,3).  This on the surface appears more fair than straight up kidnapping people, but the logic of colonialism persists.  People become little more than resources to be extracted from the global south, sent to be productive in the global north, and when they are used up, when their bodies are broken, they must be returned to the global south.

This is the same logic that forces indigenous workers from Mexico to trek across the border, such that they may work to barely sustain themselves and their families (4).  This is the same logic that drives the brain drain from all formerly directly colonised regions, the same logic that is mirrored whenever the periphery is forced to accede its people to the center.

The question now is not whether or not there are workhouses, but rather why we must have workhouses.

***

Especially in the context of nursing homes, the use of migrant workers serves indirectly to shield the wider public from the very idea of senescence, the very idea of being a so-called "useless eater".  I am not suggesting this was a purposeful, conscious effort to separate society into ostensibly "productive" and "unproductive" groups, but the effect is all the same.

From the very moment of our birth, we require assistance.  From the very moment of our birth, from when our heads are first crowned, from when we take our first breaths with our own lungs, we depend on others.  Throughout life, this trend continues.  Even as we grow "independent", even as we learn to babble and then talk, crawl and then walk, we must have those we are dependent upon.  The clothes on our backs are made by others, the food we eat grown by others, and the social cores of our lives fulfilled by others, be they friends, family or lovers.

What is drilled into us however is a radical individualism.  Large family structures, involving grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, must be dissolved into the nuclear family.  Solidarity must be replaced with competition, such that each worker must perform in comparison to their peers.  We must be self reliant, and even more so, we must disdain those who use public services.  Those on income support, and welfare must be seen as bludgers.  Those who fall ill, especially those with chronic illnesses, are seen to be sinful.  That man is by his nature selfish, that he only looks out for himself, that we are only capable of avarice.  These are the feelings and thoughts brought into us by the structures of our society.  

These thoughts cannot be true by the sheer simple fact that I am here, communicating this to you.  That you are there, reading these words.  That we have been supported by our families, by our communities, from the innocence of childhood,  to the senescence of old age.

Our current context is an anomaly.  It is ludicrous, absurd to think that any society would separate its elderly from the rest of the group in times of prosperity such as ours.  Throughout all of human history, communities have been comprised of diverse age groups.  When our species was young, when we had yet to spread to all the continents of this Earth, we lived in such communities.  When we constructed our first cities, we lived together.  When we still had hope, when we still had alternate structures to experiment with, to play with, we lived together (5).  And yet today, despite all our technologies, all our prowess, we deem it fit to construct parallel societies for our elderly.

And today still, unable to cope with worker shortages, we are more than happy to consume the bodies of the global south, such that we may at last forget our elderly.

I do not doubt some require more assistance.  I have, with my own eyes, seen the debilitating effects of strokes and dementia.  I have, with my own hands, fed those who could not feed themselves.  I do not doubt they need the support.  No, the problem is not whether or not they need assistance, but rather that of how we construct these measures.   

If we are incapable of confronting our interdependence upon each other, if we must shield ourselves from these facts by building fences from these parallel worlds, then perhaps it'd be better if they just killed themselves.

1.  https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/islander-labourers

2.  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-18/aged-care-sector-welcomes-pacific-workers-need-35000-more-a-year/101344072

3.  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-29/pacific-businesses-hospitality-worker-shortage/101370154

4.  Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies by Dr Seth M Holmes

5.  The Dawn of Everything by Davids, Graeber and Wengrow

 Other reading:  

https://www.royalcommission.gov.au/system/files/2021-03/final-report-volume-1.pdf