Recently we had an incident with our aging mother who had gone for a walk, leaving the retirement residence that she lived in. This would have been fine if mom's memory was good, but it isn't. At the time, I joked that we needed a “Marauder's Map” like they have in the Harry Potter books. You would be able to see wherever mom was wandering in the building and in its immediate vicinity. While I joked about this, I was sure that with the GPS technology they have, it would only be a matter of time before they had something like this for senior's residences.
Well, I was too late with this idea, they already have something like this and more. My sister sent me the article from the Toronto Star in their Living Section, “Checking up on Mom from a distance, Remote monitoring technology aims to keep seniors in their houses and out of nursing homes.”
The “Marauder's Map” idea seems quite juvenile compared to what they have come up with. They have shoes with GPS tracking on them – good idea for mom, but I bet we won't find a pair in her width (she has a quadruple A width which is very, very narrow, picture skis for feet). They have systems you can put in the senior's home that monitors movement, blood pressure, weight, you name it. In the article they have interviewed a woman whose daughter phoned to ask what her mother had been doing because she could see that her mother had gained 5 pounds – how intrusive is that! And you know they have monitors in the one place I always worry there will be in public places – the bathroom. I can hear that phone call right now, “For God sakes Ruthie, I was just sitting down and having a crap!”
For those of you who don't have parents at this stage yet, you might think this is too interfering. For the rest who have struggled with caring for their aging parents while keeping your own life going, you are probably wondering when you can sign up. And I have to admit, I was thinking the same, sounds like a good idea. But it all seems a little overboard when you think about it. Our society has been slowly eroding privacy for what we think are legitimate reasons – the care and protection of our loved ones. It started with our children (think helicopter parents) and now we are doing it to our aging parents.
We North Americans want to avoid all risk and we will pour lots of money into doing so or at least to give us the illusion that we are risk-free. Companies that can give us that illusion are going to make big money in the next decade with “protecting” your aging parents.
The question we have to stop and ask, is it worth it? Some of you may say that if we save one person, then yes and if it was my mother being saved, who knows what I would think. But that's the whole point. That's how they sell it to us, they personalize the fear and you open up your wallet.
But is our society safer? Are your loved ones really safer? And what about quality of life? And what happens when we pour this money into this one area and not others (like financing the whole system of quality care for the elderly, not just the rich elderly)? I think about how much money we have poured into security at airports after 9–11 and wonder has it made us safer? Was this the best use of our resources (time and money)? What if they had poured that money into making our highways safer – would we have “saved” more lives? What if they had poured that money into programs targeting peace relations, would we have a “safer” world right now? I don't know. I just know that we need to keep questioning. What seems like a good idea can just be a way to dull our fears.
When it comes right down to it, that's what we really need to address – our fears. Let's bring them into the light of day and examine them, are they real, are they accurate, and really how big are they? We say we are the intelligent species, then let's act like that and quit having that instinctive response to everything that goes bump in the night – let's really think….together, and expose our deepest fears to scrutiny. We may find that our fears are the “monsters under our bed”, scary but a product of our imagination not our reality.
Or we may find out that the real things we should fear – poverty, socio-economic gaps, climate change, over-consumption, greed, racism/prejudice (and more) are complex and we don't have an easy answer and so it is easier to insulate ourselves and give in to the fears that we know we can manage.
At the end of the day, I know that keeping mom safe isn't the same as keeping mom happy. We have to balance the two and do it for mom, not for our “peace of mind”. We can pay for the risk-free environment with mom but it leaves her frightened and confused because she is “locked up”. We can “hover” over her every move but it gives us a sense that we have the “right” to know everything about mom, that she no longer has the right to privacy. And we can do all this under the guise of “love”. And it is out of love, a love that is mixed in with our fears, fears that we never knew we had and aren't really sure what they are and where they came from.
These are all things I am grappling with and questioning. I don't have easy answers. I just know that in the end it is me, it is you, it is all of us who are “Big Brother”. Is that what we really want?….