Dear Sir
The pandemic has introduced technical terms into the common persons vocabulary – supply chain is one of those words. Most of us went shopping expecting the items we need to be present, yet that circumstance has changed for us all. Businesses cannot get the supplies they have often prepaid suppliers for, waiting for these items while their customers who usually shop at their facilities look elsewhere.
Another term is that of brain drain. The pandemic has shown that many of our businesses are experiencing mass resignations of employees who have had it with all the corporate stresses and competitiveness that often brings us down into a pit of despair and depression.
Being forced to stay at home while this pandemic raged across the land, many of our neighbours have left their professions behind for something better. Our hospitals are suffering a mass exodus of seasoned nurses and medical professionals burnt out and disillusioned by a system that cannot change, stuck in a groove of what used to be. Many businesses are desperately looking for skilled workers.
Further down the road, you find mass disarray within the senior homes portfolio. Many nurses have left, with no professionals to train the newbie nurses coming on board. Seniors who have suffered the worst of this pandemic will be once again ignored by the system, too busy rebuilding the economy. But here is a suggestion that could revigorate our senior population and fill the brain drain our economy is suffering.
Every community has senior homes and a large community of seniors. These are the folks who fought wars, and natural disasters and endured hardships that most of us could not consider. These are the superheroes that can fill in all the gaps within our economy, schools and businesses. Skilled, wise and intelligent, looking for income and something to do as well. The seniors of our neighbourhoods are the building stones of our communities and economies, solid, stubborn and rooted with attitudes of achievement and bettering themselves and their communities.
Your neighbourhood needs wise communicators, teachers, listeners, and people who can counsel a young person with gusto and true compassion? Woodworkers, construction builders, electricians and plumbers too. Our society needs such people with the skills to get the job done and teach the next generation just how it is done.
Enable our youth and seniors to interact at school, at work and within the community. Enable our seniors to rethink what retirement means to them. Let our seniors live their lives as they wish to. Stereotyping our seniors is wrong.
Seniors are living longer, and are staying healthier too. Give them the power to achieve, teach and live and die as respected individuals. Giving a senior the ability to help is commonsense.
Do we not all wish to feel needed, useful and active?
Stay local in all things. Support our local manufacturers, retailers, food growers, medical professionals and teachers. The wisdom of the aged is there for the taking, all we need to do is ask and enable these giants of the past and present.
Steven Kaszab
Bradford, Ontario
