They are our seniors

Dr. Michel E. Abs

Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches

They are our elders, our ancient oaks, the storehouse of our memory and the treasure of our wisdom. We resort to them in calamities, and by their opinion we are guided, as they bestow upon us the experience, wisdom and foresight that they have paid for dearly in their life.

They call them the elderly, and some of them call them the aging, and kindly they call them the third age. It is the most vulnerable, defenseless and marginalized group. It is the category that some think it is not needed and will not be needed, so they neglect it and do not care about it.

We saw some of them roaming the streets, begging to elicit sympathy from people. Some of them are looking for food in garbage containers, and others are thrown in the beds of the elderly shelters, as the name has been applied in Lebanon and some Arab countries, and some of them roam the hot meals restaurants established by some associations, eat what they can and hide what they can in a box they brought with them, in order to protect themselves from the evil of hunger for two or three days. As for the most fortunate among them, he is the one who obtained during his life a job with a pension plan, so he was safe from the evil of humiliation, need and homelessness, because the end of service indemnity is exhausted within a few years after receiving it.

A society that allows the dignity of its elders to be insulted can only be described as ingrate, political ungratefulness that leads to social and human ungratefulness.

The first question that comes to the mind of a sociologist who has worked with the elderly for decades is: Where are your children? Where are the ones you spent a lifetime on raising, educating and integrating them to life?

The answers come to you the least insulting and the most painful. It is a complete abdication of responsibilities at the family level. This is firstly.

The second question that comes to mind is: Where is the state? I say the state, and not civil organizations, because dealing with the elderly is a matter that requires a social policy that far exceeds the capabilities of civil organizations. These bodies can be an aid, a catalyst, or a facilitator for the policies of the third age, which are dictated by a government policy to preserve the dignity of those who delivered to us the resources of society.

In Lebanon and some Arab countries, the answers are known in advance and do not require any survey or investigation.

The neglect that afflicts the weakest group in society is nothing but a model of the weakness that afflicts all the structures of society, and only the Almighty knows when the end of the tunnel will come.

Statistics indicate that the number of the elderly is increasing globally, so what have we prepared for that in our societies? Are we ready to deal with the increasing numbers coming to the third age world?

In the Sociology of Work, which I taught for more than thirty years at the university, I raise the problem of extending people’s lives thanks to medical progress, in return for the human society’s inability to deal with the large numbers of retirees who are still of sound mind and body and who have been thrown out of work by the legal system.

There are societies that have solved this problem, as they have found several areas in which the elderly who is able to work can serve... but this requires the existence of a retirement plan that protects the elderly from the evil of need and secures health care for him. This does not apply to societies whose elderly people search for leftovers in the street rubbish, or who are thrown into shelters for the elderly, reeking of neglect, pollution and disease.

In our country, we are far, far more than we imagine, from such conditions or such policies. In our countries, our priorities are crooked. We practice social Darwinism without naming it. Our memory is weak and our conscience is even weaker.

The challenge of “managing” the third age is no less important than any other challenge that affects vulnerable groups in society, such as the disabled, street children and other groups of society.

The demographic escalation is bound to increase the problems of society, as the problems increase and diversify, but this matter cannot be solved by short-sighted and remorseless institutions whose policies are drawn up by short-sighted and more remorseless politicians.

In my country, not everyone honors his father and mother, and there are those who say to them “Ouf and curse them” instead of “lowering them the wing of humiliation out of love” and saying, “My Lord, have mercy on them as they raised me when I was young.”

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On Thursday the twenty-ninth of September, the third symposium in a series of symposia organized by the Middle East Council of Churches, as part of its program on Social Capital and Human Dignity, was held.

The symposium was attended by specialized lecturers, the director of the University of Elders at the American University of Beirut and a consultant on aging issues, in addition to the president of the Association of Lebanese University Veterans. The two lecturers explored the issue of aging, retirement, protecting the elderly and preserving their safety and dignity.

It is clear, through the two lectures and the interventions of the attendees thereafter, that aging and the elderly and their needs and problems are the last concerns of many of our societies and countries, and if our popular culture and values ​​did not contain basic dimensions of protecting and caring for the elderly, we would have seen the number of elderly people who beg and gather in centers that provide hot meals to them , much more.

Dealing with the elderly and drawing up policies to embrace them is only one dimension of the countries' policies in organizing the workforce and professions, and consequently the retirement systems that finance this period of life. A person, who has worked hard all his life, is supposed to be able to finance the post-retirement period with indispensable support from the public and private sectors.

The elderly sector is a sector with a permanent financial deficit, meaning that it is not expected to be income-generating or to become self-sufficient, so it must be financially supported on a permanent basis, and this support is partly from retirement programs and partly from government support.

We have included the issue of the elderly within our vision of the issue of Human Dignity and Building Social Cohesion, leading to a society that rebuilds its Social Capital in response to the disintegration that has afflicted the Antiochian Levant region since the Lebanon War and its devastating consequences on the moral level, which has been repeated in neighboring societies and may affect other societies as well.

These seminars will continue for a year, during which we will have dealt with the various phenomena that our societies suffer from and which affect and indicate the status of Human Dignity, which we have turned in the Council into a project and not into a slogan to embed our data with, knowing that the dimension of dignity and dealing with dignity is present in the depth of our programs, inspired by what the Master said and did during his incarnation and his life among us on earth.