Category: Conservative Review
Caregiving decisions begin in the bathroom
The holidays have a way of forcing conversations many families would rather postpone.
Every year, as adult children come home and aging parents gather around the table, familiar signs emerge. Someone struggles with stairs. Someone tires more easily. Someone forgets what was once routine. And with those observations come discussions caregivers know well.
The promise.
“I’ll never put Mom or Dad in a nursing home.”
It is often spoken years earlier, in healthier days, and always with sincerity. At the time, it feels like a declaration of love and loyalty. Assisted living seems distant, unnecessary, and meant for other families, not ours.
The problem is not the promise. The problem is that life keeps changing.
Circumstances change. Strength ebbs. What once worked may no longer work safely or wisely.
Over time, what began as devotion can quietly become more than one person can manage alone. Needs grow. Safety becomes a concern. Medical issues multiply. Caregivers often find themselves trying to do, by themselves, what normally requires trained professionals, proper equipment, and constant oversight.
At that point, the issue is no longer love or loyalty. It’s capacity.
That reality came into focus during a recent conversation with a friend. He had offered a small cottage on his property to help a friend relocate aging parents closer to family. The mother now uses a walker. The father has been her caregiver for years, but serious heart problems have begun to limit what he can safely do.
Still the conversation kept circling back to the same refrain: Neither would ever go into assisted living or a nursing home.
Their adult son is caught in the middle, trying desperately to make everyone happy. That is a fool’s task. In my work with fellow caregivers, I call this the caregiver FOG — fear, obligation, and guilt — because it blurs perspective, narrows options, and makes even familiar paths hard to see. No one wins.
It is like driving into actual fog. Visibility drops. Muscles tense. Judgment narrows. We try to peer miles ahead when we can barely see the hood of the car.
Every highway safety officer gives the same advice: Slow down, turn on the low beams, and stop trying to see five miles down the road.
Caregiving requires the same discipline.
My friend asked what I thought.
I suggested we lower the emotional temperature and start with one concrete issue.
Not the promise. Not the arguments. Not the guilt.
Start with the toilet.
Laugh if you like. It sounds abrupt. But it has a way of clarifying reality quickly.
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The bathroom is often ground zero for caregiving challenges. If the toilet is not safe and accessible, the demands on the caregiver escalate immediately. Transfers become harder. Fatigue compounds. Falls become more likely.
Once the toilet is addressed, you move outward.
The shower. The bedroom. Doorways, lighting, entrances.
Sometimes modest changes are enough — grab bars, a raised toilet seat, a walk-in shower. None of these are exotic ideas. But determining needs honestly requires facing the limits of strength, balance, and endurance as they exist today, not as we wish they were.
While politicians and toilets often deal with similar subject matter, toilets remain refreshingly honest. They simply reveal what actually works.
When families do this, reality follows. Cost. Time. Budgets weighed against needs. Timelines measured against declining strength. What once felt like a moral standoff becomes a practical evaluation.
Fear, obligation, and guilt begin to loosen their grip. In their place come planning, stewardship, and direction.
This matters because emotional decisions often rush families into choices that create larger — and sometimes far more expensive — problems later. We see this dynamic everywhere, including politics. While politicians and toilets often deal with similar subject matter, toilets remain refreshingly honest. They do not respond to intentions, promises, or speeches. They simply reveal what actually works.
Families do not choose assisted living or nursing homes in the abstract. Toilets always have a seat at the decision table.
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Surveys consistently show that most older Americans want to remain in their own homes as they age. That desire is sincere and understandable. But staying home without meaningful accommodations transfers an enormous burden onto the caregiver. The home may remain familiar, but the cost — physical, emotional, and relational — often rises exponentially.
Most promises are made sincerely. They are also made without a full understanding of how disease progresses, how bodies change, or how deeply caregiving reshapes everyone involved. Honoring a promise does not mean freezing it in time. It means continually asking how we can care well, given today’s realities.
Assisted living is not a surrender of care. In many cases, it is an extension of it. It allows families to return to being sons, daughters, and spouses, rather than exhausted amateur medical staff running on guilt and fumes.
We are not obligated to preserve every arrangement exactly as it once was. We are called to steward what has been entrusted to us — finances, time, energy, relationships, and the caregiver as well.
Circumstances change. Strength ebbs. What once worked may no longer work safely or wisely.
Important decisions are best made with clear heads, honest assessments, and wise counsel — not under the duress and resentment that so often accompany them. The days after the holidays are not a verdict. They are an invitation to slow down, think clearly, seek experienced guidance, and choose what is best not just for one individual but for the whole family.
The path forward is rarely determined by emotion, decades-old promises, or guilt.
More often, it is clarified by something far more unassuming — and far more truthful.
The appliance in the nearest bathroom.
Ted’s Excellent Adventures
It cannot be said that Theodore Roosevelt has suffered from historical neglect. Harvard’s collection of Rooseveltiana boasts 14,000 works by or about the man. A casual perusal of Amazon’s Top 100 Audiobooks on Presidents and Heads of State turns up no fewer than 10 dealing with TR, more than any of the executive fraternity with whom he shares Mount Rushmore. A celebratory Roosevelt biography by Fox News anchor Bret Baier is currently ensconced on the New York Times bestseller list.
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Rushdie on Death and Dying (While Remaining Alive and Well)
Through no fault of his own, the author Sir Salman Rushdie has become the English-speaking world’s premier purveyor of writing about death. The brutal reason for this is that, on August 12, 2022, Rushdie was stabbed several times in Chautauqua, New York, while preparing to give a talk—about, ironically enough, the United States as a place of safety for writers fleeing their home countries. Rushdie survived, miraculously, but lost an eye and the use of one hand in the process. His attacker, Hadi Matar, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempted murder, and now faces federal charges of terrorism under the auspices of Hezbollah.
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A Righteous Man in Japan
In the early 1940s, in the middle of World War II, a young Jewish student was arrested for wearing tefillin, phylacteries traditionally placed on the arm and head during prayer, on the rooftop of a store. This was somewhat of a surprise, for he was neither in Berlin nor Warsaw, but rather Kobe, Japan. Thousands of European Jews had obtained visas through the heroic kindness of Chiune Sugihara, vice-consul for the Japanese Empire in Kaunas, Lithuania, who risked his life to provide safe passage out of the reach of the Nazis and into Japanese territory. Included among these survivors were many students and teachers of the renowned Mirrer Yeshiva.
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The ticking clock no conservative wants to admit about 2026 midterms
Conservatives across the nation are already fretting over 2026’s midterm elections, convinced that a Democrat wave would tie the Trump administration’s hands for the president’s final two years.
But BlazeTV hosts Steve Deace and Daniel Horowitz argue that’s the wrong mindset entirely. Rather than obsessing over winning elections they argue Democrats will almost certainly take, Republicans instead must be laser-focused on enacting permanent, fortress-like reforms right now — while they still hold power — before the window slams shut.
“Will we jam through what it is we came to achieve — enduring victories — and meet the moment before that door slams?” asks Horowitz.
On this episode of the “Steve Deace Show,” Deace and Horowitz lay out a stark warning: Republicans have a narrow window to enact bold, lasting reforms before the inevitable Democratic wave hits in 2026.
A Democrat wave, argues Horowitz, is almost inevitable given that the economy “is really bad” and “going to get worse.”
“I don’t want to hear about the 2026 midterms. I don’t want to hear about the presidential,” he says.
“It’s not a question of how many seats will the Democrats win in a Congress that doesn’t do anything anyway. The question is: Will you use the power you currently have at the federal and state level to cement enduring change, open an economic path, alleviate the demographic time bomb, and build fortresses around policies?”
If the Trump administration fails to make deep, structural reforms that are difficult to reverse before the inevitable swing back at midterms, Horowitz warns that come 2029, we’ll be right back in the same boat we were in in 2021, when the Biden regime ushered in the unholy trinity: “January 6 persecution,” the reign of BLM, and “COVID fascism.”
“In 2021, we had no benefits of the Trump presidency left. We cannot be in that position in January 2029,” he stresses. “So now is the time to sow in tears so we reap in joy.”
Deace agrees and imagines a “doomsday scenario” where the Trump administration fails to make permanent changes and the Democrats win big in the midterms, taking control of both the House and the Senate.
“Not only is President Trump under a constant threat of impeachment, so is Pete Hegseth. So is RFK Jr. So is Marco Rubio. … I have no idea if you can impeach a senior adviser to the president like Stephen Miller. I’m sure they will figure out a way,” he says.
“But on top of that, we then watch them repeal the filibuster in the Senate at the exact same time … so then they can do whatever they want. That outcome cannot be permitted to happen,” he adds.
Horowitz says there are two things that must happen before midterm elections.
“Number one, at the federal level, you have to think of systemic reforms that Trump will go to the mat with Congress” over — full immigration/foreign worker moratorium, repealing Obamacare outright, and capping/devolving welfare programs to the states — so Democrats can’t just flip them back easily when they return to power.
Number two: “Jazz up your base and entice them to actually vote for something in a general [election],” while also focusing on primaries to elect strong, fighter-type leaders who will actually stand firm and build “fortresses” when Democrats come back swinging.
If these two things don’t happen, he warns “we’re going to face the Fourth Reich with nothing but a feather in our hands as a weapon.”
To hear more of the conversation, watch the full interview above.
Want more from Steve Deace?
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Battleships and Beyond: How To Stop China From Dominating the High Seas
The effects of Nicolás Maduro’s sudden downfall are now rippling far beyond the Caribbean basin. To wit, the U.S. military toppling the Venezuelan dictator without breaking a sweat is a humiliation for the Chinese Communist Party, which cannot dominate even its immediate neighborhood because of American armed might. Xi Jinping seeks not only to drive our military out of the Western Pacific, but also to build his own globe-spanning forces. If he succeeds, China will inhibit America’s ability to defend its interests even close to its shores.
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