Be happy… or be joyful!
So today’s annual celebration has done the elderly a great favor, right? Or has it?
THERE must have been a time when there was no need to have a Grandparents’ Day. People just naturally loved, revered, admired, appreciated, and some even worshipped their grandfathers and grandmothers.
But disasters and wars, famine, and poverty years after, people just had to fend for themselves; there wasn’t any more time and heart for aging, sick people who seemed to have no more use in this hapless world.
Things changed only in the 1970s. Historians in the United States have it, that housewife Marian Lucille Herndon McQuade, of West Virginia, campaigned for better attention for the elderly by setting a national day to honor them. She launched the day in her home in 1973. Senators Jennings Randolph and Robert Byrd heard her, supported her cause and eventually filed a resolution for a Grandparents’ Day as a national holiday in America.
In 1979, US President Jimmy Carter then issued Proclamation 4679 declaring the first Sunday after Labor Day each year as National Grandparents’ Day.
The PH Experience
Filipinos have greater regard for their elderly for a longer time. Because it took 10 more years after the Americans set a special day for grandparents when the Pinoy found it already necessary to also have a Grandparents’ Day. While Americans started their Grandparents’ Day in 1979, Filipinos started celebrating the event only in 1987.
Families celebrate, holding reunion parties or treating their lolo and lola to dine in special restaurants, hospitals give free medical checkups; civic groups, schools, alumni associations go on medical, dental, optical, psychological testing missions; and activists fight for human rights and privileges for the elderly.
So, Grandparents’ Day has done the elderly a great favor, right? Or has it?
Briefly, here is Lola Conching’s story…
Conching (not her real name) was born in a family of nine who could hardly make both ends meet. Her father did not have a permanent job; neither did her mother who had to stay home to take care of the children.
Conching went to a public school for a free elementary education, but with meager means for her miscellaneous school expenses, she reached only Grade 5. As soon as she was old enough to work, Conching found a job as a domestic helper, then as an employee in a dress shop. She earned enough to be able to save for a pension plan and even invest in a modest house and lot for her family.
But when she turned 60 and claimed for her pension payments, Conching, who had remained single, found out that someone else had already claimed her pension. Worse, another person had also claimed the house and lot she was investing in. So there she was, abandoned by people she had trusted, and would soon become homeless.
Conching remembered to ask for help from her former employer who took her in as a domestic helper. The lady kindly brought her to the Anawim Home for Abandoned Elderly.
“I am all right here, I’m having a good time,” Conching said in Filipino of her new life in Anawim.
Anawim, the Greek word for “God’s poor,” was founded by the lay preacher Bo Sanchez and his faith group, Light of Jesus Family, who first thought the home would take in abandoned indigents.
But when they applied for accreditation at the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), the government agency advised Sanchez and his group to make the home exclusively for the abandoned elderly.
Apparently, it’s because there’s a dearth of homes for indigent elderly who have nowhere else to go, no one else to take care of them or, simply, no one cares.
The government has the Golden Acres, one of the homes established by Imelda Marcos when she was First Lady, and there are about a measly thousand facilities being maintained by nongovernment organizations and some private groups.
Today, the facilities are not enough to accommodate the rising population of the elderly. The Commission on Population (PopCom) said the growing number of senior citizens would affect the economy, particularly in the area of health and social services. Recent statistics show that people above 60 years old comprise 7 percent of the country’s population. The country now has 7 million senior citizens, and PopCom estimates the number will double by 2030. DSWD statistics show that 1.3 million older people are poor.
The laws, the lows
Today, Grandparents’ Day, the government must look at how well it has given the grandfathers and grandmothers the high esteem they do deserve.
To be fair with the government, it has acknowledged the important role of older people in nation building by providing through a legislation benefits and privileges not only for the indigents but also for all senior citizens. There are some complaints about the implementation of the laws, however.
Once, William Shakespeare said the fault—about misfortunes—may not be in our stars, “but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Could it also be that the fate of the laws is not entirely in the hands of the legislators, but that some underlings in our midst go as low as to abuse the laws?
Senior citizens’ groups lament not only abuses of the laws, but also the general perception that old people have old ways which no longer work in today’s modern world. Thus, you see ads specifying a certain age as a requirement to qualify for a job. You have younger staff who do things their way, disregarding the more efficient systems older employees have learned as more effective throughout their long years on the job. And yes, you have children who simply sniff at lola’s warnings about the ways of the devil.
Again, to be fair with the ones concerned, there are companies or employers who prefer to trust—and pay handsomely—the experienced and, thus, the wiser, hiring them as consultants. There are wiser, younger people who prefer to sit at the foot of the seasoned person from whom they could absorb not only knowledge but also virtues to succeed not only in their career but also in life itself. And, there are children—especially those raised well by their parents—who not only respect but who do love and adore their grandmas and grandpas.
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