What we are giving up as a society that no longer cares for countless elders.
In 2020, on the other hand, I have seen so many travesties against elders and their dying that I have reassessed how their treatment affects and reflects on all of us.
In Between the World and Me (2105), writer and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates presents the underlying formulas of racism, power, brutality and oppression that undergird the privilege and profits of American society. Here is one such formula: “To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease.
When adults enter into a sexual relationship, they engage and develop physical and emotional routines that are similar to a mother and infant: they hug, kiss, rock and hold each other, comfort each other with baby talk, and provide care for each other. An adult “pair bond” forms from these activities (though they are being used for genital sexuality, not for infant protection and survival). Consequently, an adult sexual relationship produces feelings of infantile or childish attachment that happen even if the relationship is abusive or psychologically toxic.