Gasps of life

This week I read the news story of a 103-year-old woman who, with an expired licence and no insurance, was stopped while driving to visit her friends.

This story moved me almost as much as that of the elderly man from Trentino who, at 92, escaped from his care home last July to go back to his own house. Of course, they brought him back.

The condition of elderly people in the post-human era is dreadful. They are kept alive beyond the point of dignity only to be shut away in care homes or confined somewhere with nothing they can do. All of this, of course, in the name of their "safety". Rather like in the infamous pandemic years, when everyone was shut up at home, partly on the pretext of protecting the elderly, who ended up dying in confinement without even being able to have their loved ones beside them. This is the inhuman society we are building.

So I am glad to read about gasps of life, and I hope more and more people, old or not, rebel against a world of ever tighter rules and bureaucracy, dressed up in morality but whose ultimate aim is to repress the little humanity that still resists.

m.m.