I'm Gen X, near 50 years old, and my early Boomer dad is still alive in his upper 70s. I learned a lot from him when I was younger, even well into adulthood, but then in the last five years or so I began to think he had nothing much left to teach me. How wrong I was. This has become clear in just the last six months or so.The Boomers understand the value and efficacy of pushiness and disagreeableness. They understand that yes, you can stand up to authority and get a decent outcome, a better one than you'll get if you don't stand up. I'm sure they learned this in the 60s and beyond; even in the 90s, well into middle age, the Boomers were very willing to tell off politicians and other government authorities and insist on their rights. Perhaps the last big uprising in which the Boomers came out in large numbers to advocate for freedom and rights was the so called Tea Party Movement. Whatever you think of that movement, people were willing to face down politicians and authorities at risk to themselves.A few months ago, my dad and I were called into the ER by my mom's oncologist. All we were told is there is an emergency related to some scan results about her cancer. The whole thing turned out to be a setup.We went to the ER and no one knew why we were there, even though the oncologist at this hospital told us to come and that he'd notify the ER about us coming. We explained we were called in, then after waiting quite a while, an ER doctor who had phoned the oncologist in this hospital came in to tell us my mom/his wife is imminently dying and has to go to hospice. Then a social worker came into the ER room to begin setting up her transfer to a hospice facility. They said my mom was delirious and couldn't make decisions, which she sort of was at the time as an effect of recent cancer treatment, so the social worker was ready to just grab her and send her off to a facility, away from her home and family, on the social worker's own authority, just like when a
>>526345554child is removed from a home. My dad spoke up, very agitated and forceful, and insisted we do home hospice and take some time to process all this information. The social worker tried to argue with him, insisting she has to go to a facility, but my dad was in the right, legally, as next of kin, and the social worker who was ready to snag my mom like a foster child had to relent and give us some home hospice companies to call in our area. The social worker also insisted that we get in touch with one immediately, while still in the ER, before we were allowed to leave and take my mom home, and so we called a home hospice company to set up services (which we never ended up using -- just delayed them, at my dad's insistence, until my mom did pass). Social workers are bad news. I have a Boomer family friend, very wealthy, same age as my dad (one month older), whose husband died in 2012 after a terminal illness. She also had to insist on home hospice when social services insisted on removing her husband from their home. And in her state, she had to take courses on basic first aid and administering the kind of medical care her husband was deemed to require, as a condition of her being allowed to keep her husband in their home and to do home hospice instead of using a facility.Now, imagine if you're in a car wreck. You get brain damage and your family is not around to advocate for you. The government and medical staff can just send you away to a nursing home or hospice, depending on your condition, if they cannot locate your next of kin in a timely manner. And then, when you're in the system - in a facility - the burden is on your family to get you out, by going through legal processes that can take months and may include proving that they are capable caregivers for you and that they have a decent home to bring you to.Possession is nine-tenths of the law. If the facility gets possession of you before your family does, then, just like with a child who has to
>>526345993leave his or her biological parents due to concerns of abuse or neglect, then it's up to the relatives who want to care for that person to "spring" their relative from the facility. Whereas if the family takes the person first, like you in the car wreck or a kid who has to leave their biological parents, then social services has to go through the work of taking that person from you in order to send the person to a facility/foster home/group home. So, make sure to get possession of a loved one quickly, in an emergency or if social services is about to take away your niece or nephew, because if the government takes the person first, then the burden is on you to go through all the bureaucratic hurdles to get possession of that person.And just think, if you, after the car wreck, spend four months in a nursing home before your family get you out to care for you, then you, or your estate (all you own), are on the hook for all the expenses occurred during that period when you were in the system, i.e. the nursing home cost, which would run $40,000 or more for those four months, and the ER and ICU bills which could be even more. And nursing homes WILL get paid. The government will always side with them and, if need be, just take your house and sell it or auction it to contribute toward the debt you owe to the medical/care system. A lot of Millennials, Zoomers, and even Gen X'ers whose parents are still alive and who expect to receive an inheritance like a house are going to be in for a shock when the system finds a way to rape your family member's estate before they pass away. There are many ways to do this, and I suspect them getting ahold of the family's money is the reason why social workers insist on hospice facilities, don't even mention the possibility of home hospice until you or a family member brings it up, and then try to dissuade you from home hospice or try to pretend it's not a realistic option. In my mom's case, she outlived her prognosis
>>526346572more than four times, and her oncologist and his assistant always treated her, during her appointments (which my father and I attended) with an attitude like "why are you still alive?" The oncologist ended up being correct that my mom was now in the final stage of life, but the insistence we go to the ER without any information as to why, just that there's an emergency, even when there was no emergency and the only purpose of the ER was to have a social worker get my mom into hospice, was pretty jarring. And frankly, I have no doubt that final treatment the oncologist did shortened my mom's life significantly, since before it, she was okay - as healthy as in the four years since her diagnosis, over which time she outlived her prognosis four times over - and after the treatment she declined immediately. Also, this treatment has a common side effect, which my mom and myself and dad were not informed of, but which that oncologist had mentioned several times as 100% fatal in my mom's situation, and yet he insisted on this treatment anyway. Had we known of this common side effect, of course we'd never have gone through with this. The doctor certainly knew but he ordered the treatment anyway. I cannot prove this, but I sometimes wonder if that treatment was set up to just finish my mom off. It was also recommended right after my mom, during an appointment at that oncology clinic, got into a rather heated argument with the doctor and assistant, one which clearly offended them. But in cases like this, there's nothing you can do. It's just "sometimes life suck and people do too."Anyway, the lesson is you have to push back against abuses of power. My dad and that friend of my family say the younger generations, even a lot of Gen X, are so scared of the government and authority figures these days that they're enabling creeping tyranny by being pushovers who do not insist on their rights. And now I am sure they are correct.Look at COVID in 2020. What happened
>>526347090was unprecedented in history, with a large chunk of the world, especially the modern and Western world, being put under a kind of de facto martial law where the medical industry and its "experts" got to dictate how society would run and if society would run. The medical industry is a de facto arm of the state at this point and physicians are de facto government workers with plenty of authority over your life. If we don't stand up, it'll only get worse. People who lust for power don't stop unless they are stopped. I understand that a major reason why the younger generations don't assert themselves is that, since 9/11 and the War on Terror, the government has been far more heavy-handed than it was before, and as a result, a lot of people fear to cross authority figures and just bend over instead. And this is especially true of the younger generation, who grew up since 9/11 and have known nothing but heavy-handed government their all or most of their lives. They don't remember the 70s, 80s, and 90s when people were a lot freer than they are today and the state and people vested with authority were far less authoritarian than they are today. I don't doubt that socializing the young to fear the state and authorities was a motivator for the heavy-handed approach after 9/11, among other motivations related to crushing the popular will for the sake of further empowering the oligarchs. But freedom is never given freely; it is always seized at great risk. If we don't stand up for ourselves, then we're screwed as things just get worse. This isn't the first time in history that people had to risk their freedom and more in the name of stopping tyranny and an utterly corrupt, rotten system.And this is just one instance where my dad's methods have proved right and mine, ineffective. I still have a lot to learn from my older, Boomer relations and friends. They lived through a lot of bullshit from the government and got wise to a lot of it; at least many of them did
