Our universal human rights must include a commitment to the human rights of dignity and identity for our elderly citizens. Without a consistent commitment to their dignity and identity, every aspect of their human rights is endangered, including their equality and liberty.
On Human Rights Day, December 10, people around the world remember the guarantees of our Universal Human Rights for all people around the world. Human rights activists regularly speak to the continuing challenges that we see in human rights for those oppressed due to their ethnic, national, religious, gender, or other identities. We have human rights conferences for many of those who continue to be denied their rights, in many parts of the world, including women and children.
But our elderly citizens, who have struggled for this generation’s human rights, are denied such attention when their human rights are threatened. They are not recognized as a group which is being denied their human rights.
Many of our elderly citizens are routinely denied human rights that we all struggle to defend, and which many of us take for granted. They are challenged by those who would use force to steal from them and assault them. They are challenged by those who seek to cheat them, including criminals who regularly target them with fraudulent schemes to steal from them. They are challenged those who practice a discriminatory form of “ageism” to discriminate them and deny them equal rights in society, and by too many who abuse our elderly citizens as the source of derogatory and disrespectful comments.
But of all of these human rights challenges to our elderly citizens, the greatest threat is one which seeks to strip of every aspect of their dignity and identity, undermining the very basis of our human rights.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is based on recognizing the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as the cornerstone of our universal human rights. Yet that inherent dignity and even identity of too many of our elderly citizens is being stolen from them daily, and we have no rallies, no conferences, and no impassioned speeches to call for the defense of their rights.
The worst human rights violator today against our elderly citizens is not a dictator, not an oppressive regime, not a hate group – but it is a cruel, ruthless, and unrelenting destroying – disease.
Alzheimer’s Disease is not a “normal part of aging,” but is a progressive, fatal disease which attacks the brain, causing memory loss of one’s surroundings, and eventually memory loss of one’s own identity. Alzheimer’s Disease attacks every aspect of human dignity and liberty: our freedom of speech, our freedom of movement, our freedom of choice, and even our freedom of conscience. Alzheimer’s Disease attacks not just the body, but seeks the destruction of our elderly citizen’s minds, memories, and beliefs.
We have many human rights violators that seek to deny groups public expression of their values and even their public identities. But the human rights violator of Alzheimer’s Disease goes even further – it seeks to deny one’s private identity, one’s private thoughts, and even one’s private sense of self.
In the United States of America alone, there are over 5 million people suffering from the human rights violating illness of Alzheimer’s Disease. This cruel disease seeks to continually debilitate its victims until it has done everything to destroy every aspect of their human rights. As documented by the Alzheimer’s Association, the United States will see a 44 percent increase in victims of Alzheimer’s Disease by 2025. In 2013, Alzheimer’s will cost the United States $203 billion. This number is expected to rise to $1.2 trillion by 2050. Furthermore, this human rights-violating disease disproportionately attacks women as well. Two-thirds of Alzheimer’s Disease victims in the United States are women.
The human rights-destroying Alzheimer’s Disease knows no boundaries and no divisions in attacking our elderly citizens. Recently, researchers have indicated that the increase of Alzheimer’s Disease in developing countries will create massive societal problems. Dr. Molly Fox, who is an Alzheimer’s Disease researcher, states that “today, more than 50% of people with Alzheimer’s live in the developing world, and by 2025 it is expected that this figure will rise to more than 70%.”
When our elderly citizens struggle to remember their family, their surroundings, their lives, and even themselves, they are being denied a fundamental basis for any human rights in a society. When our elderly citizens attacked by the Alzheimer’s Disease cannot even remember or spell their own name, they are not only denied their inherent human rights of dignity, but they are denied their very identity.
Many of our most abused world citizens denied their human rights at least can recall who they are. But for millions and millions of our elderly citizens around the world – they are denied even such a basic human right of dignity and identity.
The generation that raised us deserves better than this. They too deserve their human rights of dignity and basic human identity. They too deserve the inherent equality and freedom that all of our human family is entitled to.
We rightly remember the many different human rights causes and campaigns on Human Rights Day. Let us also remember the human rights needs for the millions of elderly citizens who cannot speak out for themselves, who cannot rally and petition for their human rights, and who are too often forgotten and ignored by those who would not have a world or a life, without the sacrifices of our elderly citizens.
On this Human Rights Day, we must call upon our government and our medical industry to make serious, focused, and renewed efforts to battle and defeat this cruel disease that seeks to destroy the human rights, dignity, and identity of our elderly citizens.
Until they do, this human rights catastrophe will not end with the current generation of elderly citizens, but it will continue to your generation and to your children’s. If we seek to stand for our universal human rights for all, then we must also seek to stop this destroyer of human rights for our elderly citizens – today and tomorrow.
