On the couch with my sweet love, eating sunflower seeds, enjoying music, watching the baseball performance. Commercial comes on, I've seen this product before. The volume is off, so it's just the images.
Worried old lady looks spooked, old person writhing on the ground (image gets fuzzy and stained an odd color, to let us know the old person is damaged), next we see "good news, relief" face, fire fighter and paramedics, happily ever after... you know this ad?
I've probably seen an ad for Life Alert! a few hundred times (I watched the Price is Right with my grandparents for years), and never before has this it induced the recognition of what the advertisement is so clearly announcing:
Elderly American humans live alone, and in a space that they believe is just waiting to claim their life — their own home. Scared and destroyed... press a button and someone will come save you — this is a thrashing condemnation of the health of this culture.
What the fuck? Life ALERT! Their website claims that they, quote: save a life from catastrophe every 11 minutes!
Horrifying. Frail old people living alone, living alone, living alone? Old people live alone... bizarre.
Be afwayd! Be vewwwwy afwayd!
ReplyDeleteFrail old people living alone, living alone, living alone? Old people live alone... bizarre.
ReplyDeleteWhich describes my mother's situation. But what am I supposed to do, harness myself to her, who's living in a half-million dollar house that's literally next door to the place in the Maryland countryside where she was born in 1933? Especially after my wife and I decided to flee the United States after the Cheney regime stole another four years of power in 2004? My mom was not bloody likely to move to Australia and Canada. And anyway, she LIKED Bush. She still defends Nixon. Some people make their own lonely beds. But we did persuade her (after much resistance) to get a Life Alert.
Bukko: one of the things I'll try to do, in this space, from time to time: take things that appear to be normal (such as the elderly living alone and relying on electronic emergency devices to make them feel safe/actually keep them from a lonely death) and skewer them for the insanity they represent.
ReplyDeleteIt is not intended to be a personal attack — however, I'll sorta answer your question:
Did you flee the United States for another country that has the same dominator mentality (like Canada or Australia) but just doesn't have quite as much geo-political umph! as the United States... if so, blah!
So far as I can tell (and that isn't all that far), those countries are all quite similar... just one has a larger arsenal and therefore they do the legwork under which the others "benefit".
So, you know: fuck Canada and Australia too.
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ReplyDeleteLife Alert
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ReplyDeleteLife Alert