Being on top was such fun!
The products were cheap, and the gun
Assured they’d keep coming
Velocities numbing
Til ammo we’d spang out of run.
Those multi-national boys
Didn’t make you buy all of those toys.
You bought them not thinking
From China, though shrinking
Your dollars without so much noise.
It’s jobs that you want, and you’re right
But you’ve got to be part of the fight.
Throw out all your plastic
incumbents and spastic
Buying and crying and spite.
The CEOs bankers and pols
Helped you do it but aren’t Commie moles
It’s true they’re just like you
Their coppers will strike you
While your coppers strike at the doles.
Stopping a train just ain’t easy
The methods are bloody and sleazy
But changing direction
Requires a correction
More solid than whiney and breezy.
There’s something mildly annoying and intrusive about having ourselves tagged and numbered by some damned academian somewhere as a particular personality type. But when my good friend, Rich, sent me this link along with the question, “Does this remind you of anyone you know?” I clicked it.
“INTJs are strong individualists who seek new angles or novel ways of looking at things. They enjoy coming to new understandings. They tend to be insightful and mentally quick; however, this mental quickness may not always be outwardly apparent to others since they keep a great deal to themselves. They are very determined people who trust their vision of the possibilities, regardless of what others think. They may even be considered the most independent of all of the sixteen personality types. INTJs are at their best in quietly and firmly developing their ideas, theories, and principles.” —Sandra Krebs Hirsch[15]
If I were the kind of person who allowed himself to get pissed off about things other people do and say this would really piss me off. In the first place, I don’t even believe in psychologists and psychology. What the hell do they know about anything?
Secondly, wrapping people up into a nice little package and putting a colorful bow on it, sending it out as though it were a gift for anyone who wants to claim he knows something about people and the way they think is an invitation for more of that sort of insufferable thinking-behavior disguised as learning.
Thirdly, the way institutional science is forever confusing itself with engineering without ever pondering the consequences, next thing you know there’ll be all manner of psychologists getting themselves government grants to devise ways to profile their homespun stereotypes so’s some branch of government with an opinion about a particular type can identify them for their own purposes.
For instance, every day you can read about physicists at CERN and other labs patting themselves on the back and saying, “Oh yeah, we’re creating baby black holes. They just vanish. No danger of one of them getting away and gulping up the planet earth.” As though they know what the hell a microscopic black hole is doing, or likely to do in orbit. Heck, maybe it was just in a slower orbit and got left behind until the next time earth comes around Old Sol to pass through and grow a little every pass.
Think about it. Those Manhattan Project guys developing the atomic bomb consisted of a significant portion of whom thought testing that device might set fire to the atmosphere. They got out-voted, not because anyone knew it wouldn’t, but because most believed it was a low probability.
How’s that for some exercise in risk-taking judgement? “Hey, let’s put it to a vote. How many think there’s a big chance if we detonate this thing it will destroy all life on the planet by setting fire to the atmosphere?”
40 PhD physicists raise their hands.
“Okay, how many don’t think there’s a very big chance it will?
60 PhD physicists raise their hands.
“Cool! Let’s run with it!”
And the majority turned out to be right. Whoopee! Now, generations of scientists later all over the world consortium of pointee-heads in laboratories and behind desks at universities can hold that up as an example of how to measure risks they’re taking without ever getting outside their closed circles of wisdom and knowledge.
But I’ve digressed. Back to these grant-prostitutes calling themselves psychologists.
You and everyone else can be assured there are graduate students somewhere creating a box to hold all your personality traits, figuring out the buttons to push to produce a particular behavior from you. What words, images, sounds will inspire you to buy a particular type of product, vote a particular way, choose a direction for your life. The grad students just do the work, but some hotshot pointee-headed prof will give a paper about it when the National Association of Prostitute Psychologists meets next spring and position himself for more grant money.
But you can be equally assured that cop shops and the ilk have hired them out to help them see what else is in the box they have you in. Yeah, you’re all these things, so you’re also probably a serial killer, terrorist, baby-raper, or someone who just doesn’t have any damned use for authority figures.
You’ll be damned lucky if they don’t outlaw you sometime because some hired-hand grad student working for a grant-hack prof put the wrong thing in your box.
Here’s an example. A gentle, harmless personality box. But just listen to what else is in there to light up the eyes of the cop shops. But I suppose old John Denver’s probably not concerned about it.
Old Jules
The John Denver Show (BBC), 1973 – Poems, Prayers and Promises
This is a confusing situation. First I consulted my feline advisers about it, which didn’t help much.
Mr. Hydrox did, however, point out that the chickens, coons, possums and deer want to be like cats, coming onto the porch eating cat food, which gave me pause. But then I discussed it with the Great Speckled Bird, who pointed his spurs of blame in the direction of the deer and the coons, mainly.
“You’re constantly having to run them out of the chicken feed you put out for us. Those deer aren’t even scared of you, but it’s fun watching you trying to chase them off throwing rocks, cussing and waving your arms around. Damned deer want to be like us chickens.”
The deer were next in line for consultation. That’s more difficult because they don’t speak proper English. But a young buck assured me it was the feral swine causing the problem. “Squeeee deer are just hungry. Squeee don’t meannnnn no harm ner try busting things up. Most of ussss. It’s them damned wild hawggggs doing that. They want to beeeeee like us deer. Copycat bastards.”
What I was trying to figure out was why ‘we’ US citizens want the rest of the world to be like us.
At least, we want them to want to be like us
Time was not so long ago when the US cared so little about whether the rest of the world wanted to be like us, or not, the thought would have never entered their heads yea or nay. Prior to WWII most US citizens wanted nothing more than to go about their own affairs and be left strictly out of the troubles spilling blood all over the planet. What the rest of the world did was the business of the rest of the world.
Earlier, during the Civil War, when the UK was trying to decide whether to join the French in the invasion of Mexico, the Prime Minister was saying a lot of things to Queen Victoria about the leadership of the country (Abraham Lincoln), the reasons for the war, the conduct of the war, that Americans would have found painful to hear if they hadn’t been too busy killing one another to pay attention.
But they’d have found those remarks between the PM and the Queen painful because they contained so much truth. Not because they cared a damn what the leaders of the UK thought about the US.
We’ve spent the last half-century trying to make the rest of the world want to emulate us, politically. Most of the world wasn’t interested. But we did succeed in a lot of ways nobody anticipated. We shipped all our industry off to the countries we’d spent a lot of lives and treasure whupping the socks off of, trying to help them be like us just a few years earlier.
By ‘we’, I’m not talking about ‘me’, nor am I talking about ‘you’ if you happen to just be a regular person who wasn’t involved in making decisions to ship all our production, manufacturing and skilled labor jobs off to third world countries because of the cheap labor and ostensibly trying to help them to be like us.
The ‘we’ I’m talking about is some nebulous consortium of folks who had enough money to own companies, factories, mines, lumber mills, steel mills and all the other components involved in a healthy economy with a population of employed citizens.
And by ‘we’ I’m also talking about several generations of bought and paid for politicians of both parties who found themselves more attracted to serving the interests of those described immediately above than protecting the interests of the citizens who elected them to public office.
When the parts of ‘we’ described above were minding ‘our’ own business the part of ‘we’ not included had thriving industry, plenty of jobs, affluence. Anyone who wanted a job could find one.
But gradually, as ‘we #1’ and ‘we #2’ succeeded in making the rest of the world in our own image in some unanticipated ways, all three of ‘our’ industry and production infrastructures became a dead shell. All ‘our #3’ jobs became government related, or pure government, or ‘service’, such as selling insurance, flipping hamburgers, running the sewer plant, advertising, cashiers, sales, lawyering, medical, and cops. The kinds of jobs producing nothing of lasting value, nothing for export.
And in the process, the world we made in our own image wanted to be like us. They wanted cars, television sets, air conditioners, microwave ovens. They became super-consumers. They began needing petroleum products for energy, for plastic rubber monster toys for the kids. Petroleum to run their power plants to refrigerate. Petroleum to run their hair dryers. Petroleum to run their industries.
They became like us.
Meanwhile, the dead hull of US industry didn’t demand so much energy, but our automobiles, air conditioners and plastics requirements continued to do so.
But the rest of the world wanted it, too. They became like us. Prices skyrocketed.
So, now we don’t have any industry, don’t produce anything, but still need the energy to run. And so, also, does the rest of the world because they’ve done as we hoped. They became like us. Now maybe we need to find some other ways to make them want to be like us, before they decide to be like us in some other unanticipated ways we’ll like a lot less.
But a couple of decades ago the entire Eastern Block of Nations, along with Iran, did something we might be well served to emulate. They kicked out all the politico factions who’d been selling out the interests of the citizenries, tried a lot of them for treason and other serious crimes, and tried to start anew.
Now that they’ve managed to become like us it’s time we tried to be like them.
Finally, Tabby pointed out what’s probably both true and obvious.
“You run those chickens off the porch when they try to steal our food. You do whatever you have to do to keep the coons and possums from killing the chickens. You drive the deer away from the chicken feed. And you kill the swine because they’re dangerous to all of us and destroy everything that stands in their way of taking everything from all of us.
I’d wondered when something of this sort would happen without actually believing it ever would.
Someone keeping better track of current events than I do will probably see this as a yawn. . old news. But when someone sent me an email after talking to me on the phone about it yesterday you could have knocked me over with a feather. After pondering it a while this entire grassroots Occupy [fill in the blank] thing strikes me as rhyming a lot with what happened during the early 1990s when the Eastern Block, the USSR, and Iran all fell to pieces in less time than it takes to tell it.
Rich, a close friend, sent me a link to a site, We Are the 99 Percent, which if there’s any substance to it, might be the beginnings of something unpredictable enough to keep it interesting for a while. I suppose I didn’t think there was enough of that left in the world to even consider. My initial reaction was a bit of a ho-hum. These seem to be peaceful folk demonstrating peacefully, which, while gratifying to see going on isn’t likely to undo anything.
But then, in walks someone, or some group called ‘Anonymous’ and joins hands with the Occupy folk.
PC Magazine Article
Here’s the transcript of the latest Occupy Wall Street video from Anonymous:
Greetings, institutions of the media.
We are Anonymous.
The events transpiring within Wall Street have caught our eye.
It seems that the government and federal agencies enjoy enforcing the law a little bit too much. They instate unjust laws as mindless automatons, blindly following orders with soulless precision.
We witness the government enforcing the laws that punish the 99 percent while allowing the 1 percent to escape justice, unharmed, for their crimes against the people.
We have observed this same government failing to enforce even the minimal legal restraints of Wall Street’s abuses. This government who has willingly ignored the greed at Wall Street has even bailed out the perpetrators that have caused our crisis.
We will not stand by and watch the system take over our way of life.
We the people shall stand against the government’s inaction.
We the people will not be witnesses to your corruption and ill-gotten profits.
We will not labor for your leisure.
We will not assist you in any way.
This is why we choose to declare our war against the New York Stock Exchange. We can no longer stay silent as the population is being exploited and forced to make sacrifices in the name of profit.
We will show the world that we are true to our word. On Oct. 10, NYSE shall be erased from the Internet. On Oct. 10, expect a day that will never, ever be forgotten.
Vox Populi, Vox Anon.
The Voice of The People is The Voice of Anonymous.
That seems to shine an entirely different light on things. I don’t know whether anyone’s actually able to jiggle remote computers in a way that allows them to shut down something like Wall Street Stock Exchange, especially after giving warning ahead of time they plan to do it. But I think making the threat is bound to have every capability in the kingdom concentrated on keeping them from doing it, first, and hauling their butts off to the slammer as soon as they can slap a pair of handcuffs on them.
Gutsy stuff, or a level of confidence surprising from the perspective of a person who figures the powers-that-be can do anything they want to do with impunity. If they manage to do it the resulting power-shift leverage would inevitably seem to make a sharp turn in favor of the people calling themselves the 99 percent. But do or don’t, it pulls things out of the realm of peaceful demonstration and gives the powers the excuse they might have been wishing for to drag out the machine guns against the 99 percenters.
The people posting on the 99 percent site appear to be just regular people with a lot of justified bitterness about how things are going and a determination for legitimate change. But thinking back on the history of revolutions, the signs and banners walking out in front of the parade have always been followed back in the baggage train with enough guillotines to separate a lot of fact from fiction after the dark underbelly of human nature is exposed.
What comes out the other end tends to look a lot different than anyone thought it would going in. If this isn’t just a flash in the pan it sounds as though the people in the collateral damages zones might be in for some interesting times. But, hell. I guess we’re all in the collateral damages zones.
One of the ways I keep up on world events and amuse myself when I’m alone in an eating establishment without a book involves eavesdropping. I gaze at the food, a picture on the wall, something outdoors through the plate glass, and I listen to conversations at the nearby tables.
It’s curiosity, as much as anything else. And mostly I lose interest quickly because so often the talk is about some sports event, concert, or a television show. But sometimes it’s pay dirt.
A while before I left New Mexico I was doing the listening routine to the goings-on among several BDU and otherwise uniform clad people of both sexes, all toting large-bore automatic pistols in holsters hanging from their waists.
Turned out these folks were part of a conference between Federal and State Homeland Security forces (whatever that might be). I’d never seen that particular uniform combination, nor the patches and medallions, so I listened as closely as I dared without drawing attention to myself.
The eating establishment is on San Felipe Tribal Lands. Maybe that’s why the conversation drifted in that direction.
Fed: “Do you have any issues dealing with any of the tribes?”
NM State: “You wouldn’t believe it. Everything’s an issue.”
And so on in detail involving a lot of ‘issues’ a person born in 1943 (me), would never have believed could ever be discussed by government employees as though they should be part of any reality here. The attitude was clearly that the tribes were being irresponsible in reluctance and obstruction of the aims of Homeland Security.
The topic broadened in a while.
NM State: “I think a lot of people just don’t understand what we’re doing. They don’t realize how dangerous things are for them.”
Fed: “That’s a problem all over the country. I was in Phoenix a few weeks ago . . ., etc”
That NM Homeland Security lady all dressed up with a gun and nowhere to go was wrong.
I believe most people understand perfectly well what they’re doing and have an inkling of why they’re doing it. It isn’t a lack of understanding that makes me smile and cheer inside, knowing the tribes, at least, are dragging their feet.
I think people are beginning to ‘realize how dangerous things are for them’, to the extent that dangers actually exist in this hostile reality we’ve chosen for ourselves. But at least a part of the ‘danger’ people feel involves a new kind of policeman who thinks the US Constitution is obstructionist.
They just don’t know what needs to be done about it.
The comments on the Yin Yang Conspiracy post got me thinking about this:
In 1961, at the age of 17 I took an oath agreeing to be part of a team effort to kill anyone John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and later Lyndon Baines Johnson, thought needed killing.
Everything I’ve learned about those two men during the decades since has caused me to believe both were despicable, incorrigible individuals bent on personal power and self-aggrandizement, first, with the betterment of the US public only a priority to the extent it contributed to those.
But I raised my right hand and took an oath to become the trigger-finger for anything they wanted doing, volunteered to point a rifle and kill whomever these two car salesmen cum rich-boy opportunists found more convenient dead than alive.
My thinking today is that, despite the popularity of the choice I made, despite the fact millions of other men made the same choice to abdicate their ethics, their intelligence, their judgement to those men and others exactly of the same unworthy breed, [still do so today,] it’s not a choice to be admired, praised, encouraged, or rewarded. If anything, it’s a testimony to my own shallowness, stupidity, weakness of character and obliquely, a failure of self-respect.
Today, men and women who openly vilify the President of the US, the US Congress, detest the US military command and officer corps, are nevertheless pointing their weapons at whomever those people they detest tell them to kill. And label doing so a virtue.
Aside from the fact I didn’t know enough when I took my oath to recognize what scum the two presidents I agreed to kill for were, those people serving today are in precisely the same position I was in. They’ve agreed to do whatever the dregs of humanity tell them to do, do it without question.
The main change between 1961, and 2011, is that I agreed to do it for $78 per month, whereas they’re getting paid one hell of a lot more to obey the orders about which unlucky human beings get the downrange surprises.
Think about it. Thousands of young men died, thousands killed because Richard Milhaus Nixon told them to do it. Yet Richard Nixon outranked those politicians of the time in scumhood so conspicuously he was casheered from office by the others of his club. His own peers.
The question is what brand of common sense we choose to adopt. One trait we humans all share is the unquestionable fact that we have common sense. We’re able to spot the lack of it in others whenever it’s out of sync with our own, which frequently happens.
Among other things, it seems to me common sense ought to be manifested in personal and public choices about what’s worth getting excited about, being afraid of, and what is not.
For instance, I read somewhere recently that in the entire history of terrorism, beginning in Russia in the 19th Century, fewer than 10,000 people have died.
Common sense would seem to argue terrorism’s not a large enough issue in the world to lend much weight to private and public decision-making.
The war on drugs has been waged since the Reagan Administration. Countless millions of dollars have been expended in the effort. Today, forbidden drugs are as available on the streets of America, perhaps more available, than they were when Reagan declared war.
Common sense would seem to argue it was time to look at other alternatives about five years after it all began, rather than spending more on it, building more prisons, hiring more cops, judges, prosecutors.
We’ve known since the early 1970s that foreign energy dependence was a threat to the well-being of this nation. Petroleum and other hydrocarbons were going away. From Nixon onward, US presidents pledged and waved the bloody flag pretending an effort to free the US from foreign energy dependence by development of alternative energy sources.
Common sense would seem to argue we’re more dependent on foreign energy today, 40 years later, than we were when our elected chiefs first made public acknowledgement of the threat to national security and well-being. Which is another way of saying they lied, made meaningless gestures to an actual threat to national security and well-being, while devoting their attention to waging bloody wars on top of soil where the old-fashioned energy sources lay hidden.
Whatever common sense is, you and I certainly have a lot of it.
If we could ever discover how to inject it into the gray matter of the men we elect to office, we’d have to change the definition to something less common. Which is the reason I stay the hell away from knowing the current news events and don’t pay any mind to politics.
Common sense tells me history testifies to the futility of common sense and the futility of worrying about political matters. Common sense tells me life’s too short to fire up my ammunition at targets I can’t hit.
Lose the God-Damned Bigotry or Quit Calling Yourself an American -You’re Walkin’ on the Fightin’ Side of Me
on
Paid for by Americans to Restore Freedom, Austin, TX 1970
A word in advance: About the time Merle Haggard was reaching the top of the charts with “The Fighting Side of Me”, and “Okie From Muskogee” a war over forced busing was being fought in cities all across the country by good Americans. The poster you see appeared on telephone posts, taped to the outside of doors, windows of public places, scattered on the streets.
In 1970 a friend and I came across a guy taping one of these up near the University of Texas. He had a ream of them beside him on the concrete. We discussed it with him and his noggin required surprisingly little thumping to persuade him to give us all the posters and swear he would not do it anymore. He didn’t have the strength of his convictions.
I suppose I kept a few of them boxed up with other curiosities from over the decades.
The administrator for this blog found a few of them among some boxes of scribblings and asked what it was all about. Merle’s had a change of heart, repudiated a lot of what he said and did during those times, says we all make mistakes and we all eventually grow from having made them. But interestingly, instead of vanishing from arena of public bias, the past two years has seen a re-emergence of surprisingly similar material intended to assist in denouncing the US president.
Being a good American and a good human being isn’t about waving a flag, hating Democrats or Republicans, Muslims, or people who say ugly words about political leaders. It isn’t about fear, hysterical dialect, consumerism and waste.
Being a good American and a good human being is about personal responsibility. About having enough confidence and courage not to feel threatened by every little thing. About assuming the responsibility of not being part of the problem any more than is absolutely necessary. About self-reliance.
Sometimes it’s not obvious how a person might accomplish those things.
On a personal level your life will find itself a lot better place if you can recognize the fact you are going to die as a means of exiting it. Maybe disease, a car wreck, any of a thousand common ways that don’t have a damned thing to do with any foreign country, foreign leader, foreign war. You are going to die. No point in going into frenzies of terror and hate because the death you get stands a billion-to-one shot at being the act of a terrorist. Trust me on that. You are going to die, and I’ll only be the tiniest, most microscopic bit of a liar when I tell you it won’t be from anything any foreigner does to cause it.
On a personal level you’ll find it’s a hell of a lot better place if you can learn what is your own business, and what isn’t. If you can change it, it’s your business. If you can’t, it ain’t worth concerning yourself with, getting all worked up about.
On a personal level you’ll find your life’s a lot better place if you spend considerable energies looking at it, instead of other places, looking at what you like about it, and what you don’t like about it, and changing what you can. Looking in a metaphorical mirror at the sort of person you are and asking yourself if that is the sort of person you want to be. You can’t change the kind of person the prez of bongobongoland is, but you can change the kind of person you are into someone you have more respect for. No one respects a dishonest, hysterical coward, including you, when you see it in others.
If all of us could pull that off our own lives would be a lot better, and America would be a better place for it. But insofar as personal responsibility and being a good American, we can expand on that a bit. Here are a few things a good American might do without having to shout from the rooftops about what an admirable person he/she is:
Dependence on hydrocarbons is the ultimate problem of this nation you say you love.
Be conscious of your own energy use.
Every plastic grocery or garbage bag, every foam-plastic hamburger box, no matter where it was produced, drives up the price of oil.
Every time you fire up that hair-dryer you drive up the world-wide price of hydrocarbons.
Every made-in-China yellow ribbon ‘SUPPORT OUR TROOPS’ you buy to stick on your car drives up the price of hydrocarbons world-wide, increases the demand.
Every made-in-China flag made of nylon you wave drives up the price of oil and increases worldwide demand.
Every new plastic radio, CD player, computer monitor. Every plastic wrapper from that frozen pizza pie. Every cellophane cover and foam plastic bottom covering the piece of animal you’re having for supper and sending to the landfill afterward is driving up the world-wide competition for oil.
Sure, there are the other obvious things. The things Jimmy Carter used to beg you to do when he was prez, to help you quit relying on foreign petroleum products. Turn down the heater. Turn up the thermostat on the AC. Don’t drive anymore than you have to. Which, of course, you didn’t care for then and immediately forgot when he left office (which is part of the reason you’re in the fix you are in now.)
But there’s a lot more to being a good American, as opposed to a good human being. Here are a few more ways you could try to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem:
Quit buying ANY foreign product if you can avoid it. Even if it saves you a few cents. Just say no. Refuse and make it clear why you’re refusing. If US workers didn’t manufacture it and you can live without it, don’t buy it. If your old one’s broken buy a replacement used in a thrift store, garage sale or flea market. If it can be repaired take it to a local appliance repair shop and let a US worker repair it. Every dollar you spend on a new foreign-manufactured product reduces the value of the dollar you’ll get next paycheck because of the overwhelming trade deficit.
If this country is going to survive another century the population is going to have to begin manufacturing what it consumes, energy-wise and every other wise. Building hamburgers to sell back and forth to one another isn’t enough to keep a country sound.
Americans are going to have to produce products, and the other Americans are going to have to buy them. We can’t continue indefinitely sending our chunks of our trade deficit off to bongo-bongo land for petroleum, to China for plastic bags, television sets, seat covers and rubber monster toys. We can’t starve out our farmers by buying agricultural products from Mexico and Argentina.
Being a good American involves a hell of a lot more than getting angry when some foreigner says something ugly about it. Loyalty to America and Americans is about keeping America alive, productive, self-reliant, healthy economically.
If we can do those things we’ll find we’re spending a lot less time hurling empty rhetoric back and forth, hating the owners of bongo-bongo land oil, a lot less time bombing the hell out of foreign lands, a lot less angry and full of fear and hatred.
And we wouldn’t need to wave flags to prove we were good Americans.
Someone sent me an email forward the other day explaining to me how illegal aliens, welfare recipients, other low-lifes and me, retired and living off Social Security, is what’s causing this great country to go down the tube. I swan.
I don’t have a TV, don’t listen to radio, don’t read newspapers or magazines, but I do get email forwards and see sidebar news flashes at Internet sites. So knowing the country is down the tube didn’t come as a complete shock to me. Every couple of weeks I go to town for groceries, chicken feed and other necessaries, and the fact gasoline prices are a mite high, bread, milk and produce are worth more than they used to be, and people are older, all had me wondering if things hadn’t slipped downhill.
But knowing all those old people in the grocery lines and I are causing it surely gave me pause.
Made me realize life is harder for people with ball-caps turned sideways, studs in their nostrils, belly buttons and lips, tattoo-tears running down off their faces, and attitude have it tougher than I did all those years I was younger than I am now, because I wasn’t up here then.
I mostly try to mind my own business and tend my own affairs. I don’t want to be a part of a problem someone else has. If people living down in the trailer parks sitting in the backs of their pickups drinking beer Saturday afternoons are suffering harder than they would if I was out living under a bridge somewhere dumpster-diving for a living I wouldn’t be half the man I think I am if I didn’t consider it a viable alternative.
I paid money every paycheck for about 50 years into Social Security, but I never figured I’d come to depend on it for a living. When it happened I never stopped to consider that expecting some of it back was different from people living off their military retirement, Federal Employment Retirement, or Congressional Retirement systems.
If I need to go dumpster-diving and live under a bridge to clear my conscience I figure I can do it. Lots of people are already doing it. Just looking at them I hadn’t thought about the moral high ground they’re holding.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 
