How Children must relate to their old parents Is Part 1 of my Special Tribute to trail blazer Dianne Feinstein.
The older you get the more dependent on others you become.
The greatest champion and heroine in the US Senate, Dianne Feinstein has epitomized and exemplified the validity of that observation better than any human being I have ever known.
Dianne was a woman who truly believed in Democracy and fought for it with passion and determination till she breathed her last yesterday at the ripe age of 90.
But like most parents all over the world, her circle of friends had begun to shrink as she became more dependent on others to meet all of her fiduciary obligations to Humanity.
Children who don’t factor that into their relationship with their parents are heartless and of no use in my opinion.
A Yoruba adage speaks eloquently to such children but many of them would not hear it. If they hear it, the message may not sink in or influence or change their behavior in any way.
“Adie Irana Ko sI la je gbe” What goes around comes around.
Their parents are on the receiving end today, very soon, it would be their own turn, if they all live long to a ripe old age like the star of this write-up, our one only Dianne Feinstein.
I put myself in the shoes of Dianne Feinstein for a brief moment in my twilight years.
I now have a better understanding of what my mother and my father had passed thru in their old age.
If I had a chance to do a make-over, there are a few things I would do differently.
I recall giving monthly allowances to my parents from rents collected from my few properties in Nigeria as I was living abroad in America too far away from my parents who could not relocate with me to America for obvious reasons.
Giving them monthly allowances for their feeding and creature comforts was a good thing to do, but not nearly enough to adequately cover my fiduciary obligations to them, I now realize on hindsight.
I ought to have recognized that the older they get the more dependent on others they would have become at a time their number of friends and helpers had begun to shrink and dwindle whether they liked it or not.
Good and thoughtful children would factor that awareness into their equation to be fair and kind to those parents.
This point explains why many children in the UK and in America have always ended up putting their old parents in Nursing or Senior Citizens Homes to allow themselves a wiggle room and enough space and time to continue to work to maintain their own quality of life.
But some children regularly visit their parents in the Nursing Homes to keep them company and to assist with their coping skill while some simply abandon their parents there, and walk away.
They abdicate their responsibilities to their parents.
All they do is waiting for their parents to die,
so they could pounce on whatever inheritance their parents may have left behind, if any.
It is a wonderful world, says Frank Sinatra.
The incredibly talented Music idol is probably thinking of more ideal observation when he composed his best seller album which sold millions.
We have a lot of lessons to learn from the life of Avatars of life like Dianne Feinstein, a Jewish American woman of substance, a lawyer by profession who was elected the first female Mayor of San Francisco on her second attempt and who missed becoming the first female Governor of California,but was later elected the first female Senator of the great State of California which is number 6 in Economic Power on a ranking scale of all countries of the World.
Like late Professor Moynihan of New York, she was not just among the senators described as the Conscience of that Power Pack of an Institution, you could call her the Golda Meir of American Politics.
She had served in the Judicial Committee of the Senate for donkey years becoming one of the shakers and movers of many benevolent legislations including the most important one on the proliferation of Guns in America.
The late President of Zaire Mobutu Sese Seko used to wrongly call himself in his native tongue “Kuku Ngbendu Waza Banga” meaning “the Big Cock that crows in the midst of chickens” Since I knew the President and Dianne Feinstein fairly well, I can tell you that name or cognomen belongs more to Dianne than it did to Mobutu because Dianne was playing not in Zaire of all places but in the Big League of God’s own Country, the Bastion of Democracy and the Leader of the Free World.
With her exit, the US Senate has lost a priceless gem of inestimable value and a trailblazer who so much believed in Bi-Partisanship in passing legislations as the best and only way to go, if the legislators want such legislations to endure and to become an imperishable Legacy. She was dead right on that because legislations passed by only one Party could be easily reversed when that Party is no longer in power.
Dianne Feinstein is the polar opposite of charlatans like Donald Trump and his supporters in Congress who don’t even believe in Democracy any more and who don’t believe in the American Constitution which is now described in many quarters around the World as the 8th Wonder of the World for its ethical and moral purity and uniqueness but which is currently bastardized by Republicans like Trump and his supporters who are now openly calling for the end of Democracy in the greatest country on Earth.
Dianne Feinstein belongs to the last generation of Patriots and distinguished Senators like Robert Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Richard Shelby, Daniel Inouye, Robert Byrd and Strom Thurmond to mention a few.
That was long before shameless and scandal-prone Donald Trump had gatecrashed his way into the White House thru the Abracadabra of the fraudulent Electoral College of 570 handpicked Electors who determine who wins or loses and who will end up becoming the President of the United States after all is said and done by setting the popular vote aside.
Donald Trump had lost the popular vote to Hilary Clinton by 3 million votes in 2016 and narrowly lost the infamous Electoral College to Trump by 232 to 306.
That was how the most unlikely person ever to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom as landlord in the Peoples’ House had managed to gatecrash himself to the highest Seat of Power in the World much to our own collective embarrassment and shame as a nation.
Stay tuned for the Part 2 in due course.
I rest my case.
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