Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
I got an email yesterday from an old acquaintance who’s carrying a serious chip on his shoulder about somebody calling the Social Security pension he lives on an ‘entitlement’. He raged on about how he paid into it fifty years, and his employers matched everything he paid. So, he says, it’s not an entitlement.
Sheeze. I wonder what else a person would call it. He’s entitled to it. What the hell is it but an entitlement?
But I think he’s concerned that because ‘entitlement’ has become a buzzword for something else he doesn’t like. Namely a whole range of government payouts to bank owners, automobile companies, multi-national corporations, all manner of people bleeding the US budget dry with bailouts and payoffs. I think he figures they might quit paying him his pension because they called it an entitlement. Putting him down with scum bankers and CEOs and Chairmans of Boards and politicians.
Seems to me he’s just not thinking right. He’s gotten old up there in Al Capone country and no longer seeing the opportunity it would represent if they took away his retirement check he needs to live.
Truth is, we lived fairly tame lives, we retirees. Generally we did what was needed and more-or-less stayed within the boundaries of the laws and ethics while we did it.
In a lot of ways we screwed ourselves out of the adventure we were entitled to. The adventure of sticking up banks and shooting it out with the cops and whatnot.
Those bankers and CEOs and politicans got to have all the fun, though they didn’t do it in a way that would take them out in a blaze of gunfire. But we spent our lives in an environment with them in their houses on the hill, and down on the street corners and alleyways people were shooting it out with one another and the cops.
We just plodded along working our asses off not getting to drive limosines nor scoot around in the shadows mugging anyone. But now maybe they’re finally going to give us our shot at having some fun finally.
Seems to me it’s about time.
Old Jules
So Far From Heaven 
