There’s so much negative stuff in the dailies these days - I don’t really enjoy my lunchtime read much now, over a marmite cheese toasted panini or a chicken salsa wrap with some nice hot chocolate. Somehow, just doesn’t go with the road deaths (front page) of yesterday’s news for instance, nor the quizzing of Barrymore (tv personality) on ’secret tapes’ - I read that article at lunchtime yesterday and I felt decidedly nauseous after a long morning - I mean who wants to sit over articles on drinks and drugs, road deaths and suspicious charges?
Nope, pas moi.
However, one interesting article which caught my attention, although quite sickening to read, was that of 350,000 pensioners ‘abused’ by carers, families and friends. Horrific, ad nauseum details ensue, of absolute disrespect for the elderly who’ve been beaten and neglected and in some cases left in appalling squalor, causing hence and understandably (outrageously so) a public outcry, as one Health Reporter, Daniel Martin, of a major newspaper campaign, says,
Some have been, ‘neglected, robbed and sexually harassed last year’
(Daily Mail, Friday, June 15, 2007)
The article left me drained and reflective - but hope thrives in fact, of a move to a cultural change, as announced by the Care Services Minister, Ivan Lewis, that a new legislation will be in place to ’strengthen procedures’ to ‘make it easier to prosecute offenders’ adding,
‘I want people to be as outraged by the abuse of an older person as they are by the abuse of a child.’
(Daily Mail, Friday, June 15,2007).
We’ll all grow old one day so this applies to all of us, if not now, later.
literaryc