With a Conscience - "A heavy dose of reality"

"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."  - John F. Kennedy

After a long, and I mean looooooooooooooooong day of teaching, I stopped at the grocery store to buy a couple of things for "the husband" and I.  As I was entering the store, a middle-aged gentleman was hovering over a over-flowing shopping cart of a very elderly woman, probably in her 80's.  "I'm sorry," he told her.  "We have to take back more than half of these items.  You can't afford all of this."  The older woman stood there blankly staring at the cart.  My heart, and I'm sure his heart, was breaking into bits of remorse and fear.

We age.  We all age.  When I was 13 or 14, I wanted to be 20.  When I was 20 or 21, I wanted to be 40.  When I reached 40, I felt like the entire world was opening up to me.  When I reached 50, I realized that I had just begun my life.  Every decade, I am re-inventing the possibilities of my future.  Today, I had one question.  "Could that ever be me?  Could I end up like this woman?"  I drove home in a complete and utter fog.

I had a second reaction by the time I reached home.  "Anyone of us can end up in the situation this elderly woman was in at the store.  Perhaps she had Alzheimer's and was trusted to buy what she needed and her care-taker's trust was overly invested.  Perhaps, though, she really needed the groceries in her cart and simply couldn't afford it.  That realization devastated me. I was then ashamed because I was focusing on my own feelings and not hers and certainly not on her relative, caretaker who started taking the groceries back to the store.

It's a sad, sad state of affairs when older people are shamed into returning basic necessities because they can't afford them.  This is a harsh, harsh reality.  I realized today, that there is so much I need to be doing before, before, my energy and my passion leave me.  What is happening to the elderly of our society is not kind.  No elderly person should have to make a choice over the types of groceries they can keep or not keep.  

It is the very young and the very old that seem to be the least respected, cared for and vulnerable in our modern society.  We don't make time for either.  This is the cost of modernism.  This is the cost of putting "things" over "beings."  Our young, our elderly, give us the balance and the ability to love.  It's frustrating at times.  It hurts sometimes.  However, if we don't start putting human life ahead of our own materialistic needs, we are bound to longer, harsher winters than the present one.

As I was driving away, the elderly woman was still outside, looking at her cart.  Her caretaker no where to be found.  I suppose he was busy returning items.  I was busy wondering why I hadn't realized until now that life changes on a dime.  The new year is almost upon us and I'm now thinking that I still have a long, long ways to go in developing my understanding of the human condition.  Being 50 doesn't mean I have all the answers.   Unfortunate situations can happen to any of us at any age and it's how we look out for each other that make and keep our souls healthy.  How willing are any of us to step out of our own "self-absorbed," self-effacing" behaviors to remember that when we have more than enough, we need to advocate for those who don't.