translated from Spanish: Covid-19 and old age

Covid-19 returned the vocabulary of the elderly and elderly to the lexicon of senectud and old age. He unvisited the septuagenarians and octogenarians by transforming them into victims of a virus with a capacity for e-discrimination. He turned nursing homes into contemporary concentration camps, where corpses were accumulated as in the old photographs of the infamous final solution of the last Nazism.
As men and women express their glittering youth by jogging and cycling, and make a public statement of their ability to be above the pandemic, they also draw an effective invisible border with anyone susceptible to disease. The epidemic is building a wall between the healthy and the sick, the perfect bodies in the face of the flawed. Discriminating between functionality and disability, the new virus helps to produce a social structure founded, on the one hand, on the strength of the body, and, on the other hand, on the basis of the ability to access health services in terms of achieving reasonably individualized care. Undoubtedly, a precarious division, since the transit between one position and another can occur accelerated by a simple contagion, even behind all certified glass barriers, fabrics and plastics.
The pride of states and their health and welfare systems, the longevity of their citizens, their life expectancy, steadily increasing, and pension systems as an award or a permanent source of shame for not being able to recognize the effort of sustained decades-long work. Mothers and fathers of a world that slips down the slope of a time that once belonged to them as a mainland, as a family property of several generations ago, a stage as theatrical and transient as ours.
The right-wing and left-wing, the male and female sexes, collocolinos and blue universities, the capital and the regions ceased to exist, and it is left in the middle of the public sphere, naked, without rags to put, without remedies to administer, old age, the skeletal body that crosses the river of death dragged by an inevitable current that makes us forget those who are still on this side that the language we speak , the education we enjoyed, the democracy that came, the couples we love, the buildings we inhabited were built with the hands that we say today without hugs or responsibilities, without speech or company. Isn’t this a question for young, old one days too? Young people, yes, without sex or flag, whose answer depends to a large extent that we can, to paraphrase Dante Alighieri, avoid departing from the “straight path”.

The content poured into this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.

Original source in Spanish

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