DT 17/12/13: "Woman left to starve after care home closed"
"Gloria Foster, 81, was left to starve when her home care was closed and she was forgotten." She was not discovered for 9 days. Cases like this are reported every day or two in our national newspapers as well as stories -- every few weeks -- of whole nursing homes taken over by verbal and physical abusers and not discovered for weeks or months by the local council.
What did a tribe of hunter-gatherers do when they found themselves in a severe drought season with a grandmother who needed feeding? Their predicament meant that one or more were likely to die from starvation in the months to come. Worse still, that the baby might die and the grandmother (or grandfather) remain. She had become an economic drain. She had to go. Every hunter gatherer tribe that has been studied in the wild in the last 100 years-- I judge about 80 of these have been observed in detail -- all practised euthanasia and, in one guise or other, it was etched into their particular culture. In one example, the oldie would willingly climb a ladder into a cliff cave and drop the rope down. In the arctic region of the Nordic countries, if a family had a very old member, the whole family would go to their own graveyard (a piece of rock usually). The oldie would position herself next to the hammer of a large stone hammer. The next oldest would position himself ruther down the shaft followed by all the rest of family in age order even to a toddler who would hold the furthest end. Then the family would act as one by knocking on her head. Another hunter-gatherer tribe would eat their eldest. Another (in some nomadic tribes) when deciding to move on would leave their oldie in a tent with a little food.
Keith Hudson _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@lists.uwaterloo.ca https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
