Catastrophe waiting to happen

I have just been listening to one of the most disturbing programs. It covered the dilemma of people getting old and needing care in a home for the last months or years of their life.
As you know my day starts early acknowledged by the time which is recorded when I send out my blogs. This morning I wrote from about 5.30, having read from 5.00 and then at about 7.00 I rang an old friend in Australia who I had heard was in a home suffering from dementia. This timid voice answered, it was Jenny, not the strong assertive Jenny who I had known but someone who had regressed into her childhood and who was trying to make sense of who would ring her. "Hi Jenny its John, John Wood how are you". There seemed to be a flurry of recognition a firmness in her voice that indicated she knew who I was but then slowly the mist descended and her brain couldn't cope with the job of remembering. Her voice became plaintive and then as the sentences themselves became a struggle she seemed a child again, the simplicity of not knowing, of not having to cope with social protocol, of sounding shy towards this stranger.> > It was so sad and yet in some ways it was a relief, as she retreats into her formative years with all the simplicity she knew but didn't know. There was no pain, no regret, no nostalgia, no troubling emotions towards those you are leaving behind only a world of the immediate present, a fleeting experience that changes from minute to minute. This would be frightening if there was any sense of perspective but without any perspective, just like a child, it's their reality.
Having finished my call I thought I would see how my old friend Johannes in Africa was. He is a black man who used to work for me back in the days. Having retired he moved back home into a tribal settlement where a few years ago I had driven out to visit him and his family. It's fairly unusual for visitors to pitch up from the city and he was really pleased to see me as he waited at the side of the tar macadam road to guide me up a deeply rutted track heavily eroded by the rain until we reached his home. His extended family were there looking at me with what was not hostility but rather amazement that I had driven over 200 miles to see the man of the house. Anyway through the marvels of modern day communication, after a couple of rings he was there overjoyed to hear my voice. He has not been well, problems in the stomach as he described it the doctor was going to put him in a machine to see what's wrong but in his native assumption, that life and death walk side by side he was phlegmatic about the outcome. My call perked him up no end and I promised to ring again in two weeks to see how he is.
The reason I describe these calls is to illustrate that whilst we sit in our relatively secure, pain free environment carrying on as before, our collective experience is diminishing as friends die or become seriously ill.
Impermanence is a state we all belong to and the program I was listening to was about the increasing dysfunctionality of our social care system. The cost of keeping someone in a care home is outrageous and beyond the realm of affordability for 60% of the population. I know we oldies have a propensity to say "when we were young" but I have to say that back then old people's homes were funded out of general taxation as part of the responsibility of the State towards its old and in-firmed.
The creeping privatisation and the mantra, since Thatcher, that taxation was a bad thing and that one had to make provision for ones self, is coming home to roost.
I was brought up to understand taxation was not an evil but was paid on the basis of your ability to pay and is the financial bedrock of a civilised society.
Mrs Thatcher and her Reagan/Friedman economics borrowed from Anne Rand was the social catastrophe waiting to happen - and it's happening right now.