Alive or Dead: Nobody cares

There is something profoundly disturbing about a society where people can die and remain unnoticed for many months. There has been a string of such cases in Sydney (Australia) recently, but it could be most places in the ‘developed’ world.
[I won’t go into the grizzly details which can found at the links below or Google news keywords: skeleton body elderly death Sydney.]

Death is a reality of our existence. People die everyday, there is no argument about that. Some of our sophisticated societies still actually kill people.
Death in and of itself is not the issue, the fact that people can live and die in busy communities, without anyone noticing either state, is a tragedy.
Society, it seems, has become obsessed with acquisition and consumption. The ‘must have’ culture is driven by modern governments under the aegis of the so-called economics of monetarism.
‘So-called’ because true economics recognises both fiscal and social aspects of an economy; monetarism recognises only narrow material aspects such as wealth generation.
From the outset, under such leaders as Regan and Thatcher, monetarism gave governments the authority top shed social responsibilities. It gave them authority to ‘rationalise’ government services into a ‘corporate approach. Social responsibility was replaced by concepts such as ‘user pays’ (ignoring the fact that many services are already paid for in taxes) and ‘volunteerism’ and ‘mutual obligation’. The latter a real curiosity as it suggests that a mere individual can have a mutual contract with government or society as a whole.
Margaret Thatcher summed up this ‘economic theory’ in a nutshell: "There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families."

Still, our leaders can’t be blamed entirely when the people have so readily accepted the dream of personal wealth at the cost of responsibility.
The dehumanising culture monetarism has created has resulted in a pack of inward looking, mean, grasping and greedy individuals. It cuts off real social interaction, and cooperative existence, at the roots. It is about ‘me’ and to hell with the rest.
This fundamental change has not been forced on individuals; it has largely been adopted voluntarily. Monetarism does not provide any more certain road to personal wealth generation than did preceding models. But the promise was obviously enough to fuel latent greed.  

Scientists monitor the health of amphibians, such as frogs, to determine the health of our environment. Perhaps if sociologists and politicians were monitoring people in the same way they would see a pattern emerging and be concerned.
Even just the spectre, riches or not, of a sad lonely end, should inspire some consideration of the corruption of the glue which holds our social structure together.
The lonely lives and deaths of those on the fringes of our golden culture of monetarism might shake up some. But we all need to take stock, clear the glitter of riches from our eyes and see where we are heading.

Some stories on the Sydney deaths:
Skeleton finds: awareness the key, say Salvos
Dying alone
The issue has been raised again in New South Wales, where six bodies have been found over the last two weeks.
Parallel deaths and no lessons learnt