Idea Sharing: Time 4 An Educated Diverse Black American Caregivers Association (EDBACA)

Be part of something diverse, positive and big and remember you heard it first here from me and our Geriatric Care Manager.

AS we Baby Boomers age, we go full circle, manage or outright care for our elders. They call it “Care-Giving” now and increasingly men/sons participate. No brag/just fact.

“Although women still make up the majority of family caregivers, more and more men are stepping into the role: Some 40% of family caregivers are now men, according to the most recent research from AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, up from 33% a decade ago.” **

This topic is now a cottage industry and an issue so far neglected by those who would be our next President of the United States. As a Black American, it seems many of these agencies just want to send people who “look like” us to care for our parents, who are Octogenarian and Septuagenarian. These folks from third world counties, like Haiti and Africa, may need work and have good intentions, however their language, communication and assimilation skills leave much to be desired ninety percent of the time, in my experience. “Ask for what you want, and I’ll try my best to get it” should be the agency’s mantra.

Our hard working and lovely Irish, Italian, Jewish and other historically European-based ethnic groups call their own elder care-giver shots. Often they have long money or can acquire it from overseas to pay one thirty-five ($35) dollars an hour. Yet, when a middle class black American family, whose parents were maybe first or second generation college grads and civil servants of modest means makes a similar request of an MLTC (managed long term care) provider, we are often met with the insinuation that we are out of line, unseemly or even “intolerant” for asking that, when nothing could be further from the truth. Wanting to plug in someone superficially shows lack of real effort and imagination; “It don’t necessarily work like that!”

We too are exercising our personal family rights to have people who we feel comfortable with caring for our parents and, at least in my case, that does not automatically deem them black or brown-skinned, but it does require them to speak understandable English and preferably be from America as opposed to Haiti, Jamaica or Africa!

So these companies might as well treat me like a “white guy” then, because I’m going to ask for an Aide in-keeping with who my Mum is and the diverse values she raised me with, prior to when we let so many third world people into America to treat us, native descendant of American slaves, with disdain. You try to coach them up and they mostly reply, “Oh I know, I know” when they don’t “know” and are either too arrogant or ashamed to admit it, so that they can open the doors to empathy and learning!

When managing my own Mum’s Caregiver team (some call it “advocating for”, which is cool…) comes up in conversations that we Baby Boomers increasingly share these days, I often get the reply, “Oh you’re such a good son!”
“What else would I do? Turn my back to she who changed my diapers and gave me tough love??”, Is my response. Do people actually DO that?

If one accepts less, the system will continue to feed you less, until you accept less as the norm! Start demanding more, higher standards as were common in the 1960s, ’70 and eighties before the dumb-them-down era of President George H.W. Bush (the first).

**pickhit: stat courtesy Grace Gedye, Washington Monthly, July/August 2019

2017 Year End Reflections, IMO (Part Two)

Now that you’ve flipped-out and over my previous 45rpm record post, I hope you enjoyed side one from inside the basement boxes! Therefore, can I drop some current science reflections upon you now and then leave you to marinate upon them, until we meet in the New Year, 2018? …Good.

As we come to the end of 2017, I know I have not blogged as much as in previous years and in-fact, the fantasy of “blogging” being a money-maker is dead. I am struck by the many misinformed conversations I have heard this year from a dumbed-down populace, which began during the first President Bush administration of the United States of America, in the late 1980s.

~ At the risk of sounding intolerant of younger generations, like my parents did, I want to point-out a few things so that if any are reading this who need my enlightenment, they shall have some, lol

~ My generation, “Baby Boomers” of which my birth year is one of the last thereof, was educated better than the successive ones, which seem to have been distracted by so-called “advances” in technology. The standards of manners, self-control (without drugs), developmental punishment, adherence to societal norms, rules and authority on the family level were much higher in my formative years. This made for a better dream and pursuit of happiness. None of us are perfect, mind you, but we knew our boundaries and respected one another on a more fascinating level.

~ The point of this piece is to charge those who originally unleashed this technological “Genie” from the bottle, to educate yours and our youths to not be addicted to it, so much as they stroll down a sidewalk, into an intersection, oblivious to their surroundings and into their own peril!!

~ Often, I hesitate to engage or write, feeling it will do no good. With the so-called “leaders” we have in play, annellation is the nearest possibility, therefore my words fall upon deaf ears.

~ Also, many I encounter do not listen in polite conversations anymore. They only hear while formulating their reply and rudely interject it prior to the other party finishing their sentence or thought!
Just the other day, while having a quick bite at a local O’Charlies, I overheard a convo between two twenty- something women who sounded like jaded old bags. Their list of phobias and “cant’s” outpaced their “cans”!

~ Especially when it came to travel: one says, “After one drink, if I feel a buzz, I am calling a cab no matter how close to my house I am!” Whaa? The other one expresses how they are afraid to take an AMTRAK train, “Because they always derail!” Huh? To which the young bartender says, “Oh no, I’m not flying either, because you never know who you are flying with!” Yeah, that “logic” applies to all transportation modes and even on the Interstate, chick! SMH These young ladies are running out of options! It is very sad! If I didn’t see them, I would have thought they were two old ladies, older than I am! I should have recorded this. People have always had phobias, yet I’ve never heard them by twentysomethings and so adamantly expressed! What I overhear as I make my errands are too many individuals who are so misinformed, drive impatiently (and too fast), are undisciplined, selfish and ill-mannered.
Many people are overly sensitive these days due to misguided political correctness run amuck.

~ Most seem all to ready to turn the other cheek now. Nobody wants to complain in apathy that nothing will change unless it is scandalous or sordid like bogus reality TV! It is pathetic, because real human complaints are the seed of positive revolutionary change in society! Is anybody emphasizing learning in History class these days?

~ Political Correctness, and the lack of the “tough love” my generation received, plus the de-emphasis of measured corporal punishment (spankings) has produced an off-center, marginal generation of undereducated perverts, freaks, woodchucks and pseudo-criminal idiots who are unscrupulous and who we all should fear and take measures help or thwart proactively. how’s THAT for an “entitlement program” proposal?

~ About Geopolitical things: Did Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon engage in a rank-out sessions with North Vietnam’s Ho Che Min during the Vietnam War? No! So why is this Trump guy doing it? All he does is legitimize an illegitimate regime via childish taunts! Who is advising this guy, if anyone? Trump’s first October as President began and ended with senseless violence against innocent citizens in Las Vegas and New York City. His presence has increased many people’s frustration and anger levels, dangerously. We have not been this close to war since the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s! Kim Jung and President Fake are like two of the slowest learning, Special Ed kids in the back of the classroom, continuously chattering insults at each other, while the rest of us are trying to learn.

~ There are some things we still do not know and that recent groups of events are waaay too coincidental regarding all of these “sexual” allegations and the fall of so many of our (my) favorite public/media/entertainment personalities here at the end of 2017.

Why now? Why all of a sudden? Why doesn’t President Trump step aside while they investigate or at least be called to testify before Congress and answer to the charges against him by these women, like President Clinton had to? Ego and him wanting to be the first American Dictator is why, and we know it.

~ Were the Hunters Captured by the Game in ALL of these relationships?? Hmmmm…

~ Continue the discourse! Not just the usual suspects (although I appreciate you), don’t be too shy to say something about how we can have a better 2018 and beyond by hitting the ground running on January 2nd!!!
This is a milestone year for me, personally and let it be for thee.

~ For my list of KratesfullO’Jointz musik’s favorites who we lost in 2017, please check out The Record Shoppe! https://www.achilliadsmyvinylrecordshoppe.wordpress.com

Happy New Year! May we all survive safely and in Peace on earth to do this again a year from now! Cheers.

Used To Cost A Dime, A Nickle Could Get You Anywhere

Lately I wax sentimentally about how “things” have changed, and not necessarily for the better.  Then I always catch myself, for I remember how bitter those sentiments sounded when my parent’s generation (the “GI generation”) espoused similarly.

Sometimes I chagrin metaphorically when I see how greed is dividing the country I was fortunate enough to have been born into among the rich and poor with a diminishing middle.  I often wonder, if prices will ever truly fall while income rises?  Wouldn’t that be headline  good news?!  I see how many things are adding-up on my list of needed replacement or update that I cannot currently afford: my car, my lawnmower, my eye check-up, my dental check-up, my music amplifier, my mixer, my television, my computer, my hammer, my file cabinet, my playstation, my wardrobe, my vinyl milk crates when customed shelves are needed; my bicycle, my glasses, my location, my cordless telephone, my mobile telephone, my fence in my yard, my PC’s monitor and I think, “Damn, this stuff is outpacing my ability to live comfortably, and yet, I’m considered ‘lucky’.”

Then the verse came to me from a past favorite song that is just as relevant today as it was in 1973 when they sang it for the first time.  It is from a song called “Shoe Shoe Shine” by The Dynamic Superiors; “Shoe Shoe Shine used to cost a dime, A penny would buy you plenty/A nickel was a fare that’d take you anywhere, Troubles we didn’t have many…” penned by my radio personality days acquaintances, Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson.

So I am reminiscing the “good ole days” for my generation (the Baby Boomers), in a similar way as our forefathers did and as every generation will as they age until the aliens really DO come from a far away world in another galaxy, and make prices fall simultaneously with the sky, paving the way for the income of a species that will rise to scorn that we humans squandered thousands of opportunities to finally get it right…or not.  At least that is what tonight’s full moonlit crystal ball is revealing here in me humble casa.

Now, check out the outfits, their “steps” (choreography) and the “business” falsetto of the late Tony Washington (who was “Sylvester” before Sylvester vocally and socially), on this record that I cannot get out of my mind…

Pickhit:  Obviously and joyously effeminate (which wasn’t an issue back then), Tony Washington’s sound was so unique! I miss it.  On “Feeling Mellow” he really stretched-out in 1975; Yes, that is emcee Don Cornelius (LOL); “Love, Peace and…SOUL!” who appears to ignore Tony, by the way. Hmmmm… I would have let the lead singer be the spokesman for the group in the interview.