Monday 11 May 2015

Jackie

I received some sad news today; an acquaintance of mine has just died. She actually died a few days ago, but I've only just found out. Her name was Jackie and she was a disabled lady in her seventies who could only walk a short distance and so used a mobility scooter. She was accompanied everywhere by her dog, a Yorkshire terrier called Phoebe who was as old as Jackie was in dog years. I often used to bump into them walking from place to place around the area of town where I do most of my work and we used to talk a lot. Phoebe would always demand a pat from me. Sometimes Jackie would invite me into her flat at a council-run old people's home and make me a cup of tea. She had never been rich in her life and lived on little income during her retirement; despite this she supported many charities and gave them her old furniture. What was sad was that she was rehoused just two months before her death; she didn't move far, just from her first floor flat to a ground floor one in the same block that had a bit more space, ma front door and small garden. Shortly before that time her granddaughter turned up on her doorstep with her own three year old son, Jackie's great-grandson, with nowhere else to go. Jackie had no choice but to put them up in the lounge of her one-bed apartment. She immediately called the council and started making arrangements to get her resident family housed somewhere else. At first the council were very helpful, but then she got a letter from them announcing that she was to be evicted; not just her granddaughter and great-grandson, but Jackie as well. Just like that! This was because she'd broken the rules of the sheltered accommodation centre; that there must be no overcrowding and that nobody under the age of fifty can live there. In a fair world the management might perhaps have bent the rules for a while in order to help Jackie out in her quest to give her family a home. This is what would be done in a world run by human beings; that is not the world we live in. Most people nowadays have had the humanity beaten out of them by society until they're nothing but robots designed to serve the system; see here for more details: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/hanged-hangman.html. Jackie was a loving mother, grandmother and great-grandmother who nurtured three generations of her descendents right up to her dying day; she survived World War II and many other historical challenges since. No other species on Earth mistreats its elders the way mankind does. In fact other social animals have great respect for their matriarchs, as indeed indigenous humans used to in the pre-Illuminati ages. So old Jackie left this world while under pressure from bureaucratic authorities who thought nothing of her. She wasn't even a "human resource" to them any more; she was just what Henry Kissinger called a "useless eater". I know some people will claim that this is the fault of the "Tories!" and their government, but previous Labour governments were almost as bad. I think the "men in grey suits" had contingency plans for whoever won the election, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/anti-tory-protests.html. It's a sign of the times. The "correct" thing for Jackie to have done in today's Big Society was to kick her granddaughter and great-grandson out into the street. But she didn't; she refused to become what Charlie Chaplin called a "machine man"; and he went on to say: "...Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate. Only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural..." I spoke to Jackie's daughter who is currently looking after the youngsters and Phoebe the dog. I don't know if Phoebe will be able to survive without Jackie; she used to whimper if she were even taking into an adjoining room from where her beloved mistress was. Wherever Jackie is now, I hope she's in a better place than the one she left. RIP.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wonderful tribute Ben.

I think that 'better place' will never be 'reached' because she/we have never left it. Each 'intermission' brings us closer to where we had been all along and lifes up's and dow'ns will fit into the groove.

With sympathy and safe journey onwards to 'Jackie'...............

Ben Emlyn-Jones said...

Thanks, X :-) Amen to that.