Yesterday a nurse employed by InHome Care, Inc. visited us.
She was collecting information in order to request help for my mother.
As I understand these things, she will send the information to the company--isn't it a "for profit" company?---and then they will send this to the USA government, or the division known as
"Medicare". (Is it a "for profit" or not? I do not know. However, I believe it doesn't really make a difference. Not for profits have CEO's with lavish salaries just as much as the for profits, and as there is a broader cultural surround----which I am about to describe----it really doesn't make much of a difference. Everyone is infected with the same illness of thought.
(Moreover "InHome Care, Inc." and every other provider of help for the elderly (as far as I know) have a hierarchical system in which people are not paid what they deserve. So far as I know, every organization which provides help for the elderly does not pay the hardest workers what they really deserve. The man who comes three times a week to help my father shower does not receive a living wage. Of course, this is legal! --So much the worse for the laws of this land. More evidence that the laws of this country have nothing to do with justice! Shameful!)
But Medicare is, today, under attack. They have less and less money to use helping people because the rulers of the USA prefer to spend money on killing people abroad, or paying the gambling debts of the wealthy at home. (Of course the rulers and the wealthy are one and the same set of people.)
The nurse was well-meaning. However, at one point, she adverted to an argument against me, an argument against the way I am living, and aimed at disqualifying my mother from getting the sort of help she would like to receive.
The key point was this: Since I do not pay rent, I should be vacuuming, and doing other household chores. And, therefore, it was not necessary that Medicare should pay for help for my mother.
Now, as a matter of fact, I do household chores, including vacuuming. And, as a matter of fact, I could not work and provide such services as I do currently provide to my parents. If I were working a full-time job as a teacher (whether as a Professor of Philosophy at aUniversity or as an EFL/ESL Teacher at a language school) I would have to move out of this house in order to have a quiet space where I could prepare lessons or lectures. That I could not do while living with my mother and father.
However, it is the following thought which I wish to examine:
An adult child living with a parent should be paying rent; or, else he/she incurs
a debt.
I want to suggest that this facile thought implies that the parent-child relationship is
being modeled as an economic or business one, and I want to say that this is a distortion.
Neither are my relationships with friends economic. I do not count up how much my friends have done for me, and measure out whether or not what we've done is equal.
Insofar as Medicare or nurses engage in such thought processes, or grant them any legitimacy, they are destroying the natural relationships between family members.
Of course, the nurse did not think of it that way; but in that thoughtlessness, she was deeply mistaken.
I believe that some have found my thought hard to understand. They say something like this:
She (the nurse) was only repeating what Medicare would say. She was not endorsing it.
However, my response is: The way she repeated it lent it more validity than it deserves.
There is a dangerous game here with misrepresenting the world. And in this, I believe that Socrates had the exactly correct thought. When we are talking about how to live, you should never put forward propositions that you do not believe, that someone else believes---unless you are prepared to defend them, and, of course, if you can defend them, then maybe you should believe them...
We do not, I suppose, generally obey that Socratic recommendation. And, so we become confused. It is also true that we thereby lend a certain respectability or authority to wholly indefensible thoughts, such as indefensible thoughts as that human relationships are primarily about buying and selling--which was implied by the well-meaning Nurse's attempt to speak as if she were an agent of Medicare.
recommended reading:
"Provisional Autonomous Zone; Or, The Ghost-State in Madagascar", David Graeber, in Possibilities; Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, AK Press, 2007, pp. 157-180.
recommended viewing:
after-thought:
Of course, there are important questions raised by what I have said above, questions which I have not raised or even attempted to answer.
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