If you haven’t been following things, and chose to get ready for the Kentucky Derby with a dollop of tequila, I would not blame you. I was fully ready for the greatest two minutes in sports, though it came with the peril of nearly missing it altogether. There was so much going on.
Japan, home of the Kyoto Protocol, quietly went non-nuclear yesterday. Think of it: a national without oil or gas resources shutting down a source of relatively cheap, reliable and clean energy.
Well, cheap reliable and clean until it melts down, anyway. I don’t have any good answers on that front, and increasingly, I don’t think that I have any answers at all to the largely self-inflicted litany of troubles that beset us.
I got a note from pone of my pals who is wandering the Black Hills this week, and he is appalled at what the energy extraction interests are doing to the sacred lands of the Lakota Sioux. Well, they were sacred after the Lakota crushed the Cheyenne, who considered it sacred to them until they were expelled by the Sioux in 1776, the same year the European settlers decided to expel the King.
Change is the only constant, I guess. But a lot of us are just giving up on the whole thing. I have been following the unemployment numbers with amusement. You know the shell-game the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been playing. The latest report had a mediocre number of private sector jobs being created- a little over 100,000, while almost 550,000 left the workforce. The shell-game- follow the pea!- is that the rate of unemployment dropped a decimal point to 8.1%
That is nonsense, of course, though we could talk the Boomers who are retiring and try to parse the number of actual retirements and those who have just given up looking for work.
There has been an explosion in the number of Social Security Insurance Disability payments, for which there is no age requirement. You have to have “Plan B,” right?
I fell again yesterday while looking for something I did not need. Once on the floor, I saw what I had lost at the back of a shelf, safe and sound, and since I did not need it, I concentrated on the minor issue of returning to an upright position.
The problem with my left knee and mobility has helped to distill several things, which made me compare and contrast my life with the fictional Julia of the President’s campaign. Suppose I could not work? My regular routine is to visit the big Agency at Joint Base Bolling-Anacostia a couple times a week.
There is a chronic parking problem at the base. Believe it or not, the Agency facility was deliberately designed to have insufficient parking. This was a Carter-era social engineering concept intended to encourage car-pooling. Ignoring the fact that the workforce resides as far away as West Virginia and southern Maryland didn’t work out that well, but c’est la vie. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Lack of parking normally results in having to leave the Bluesmobile in the Commissary parking lot, which is nearly a mile away from the complex. As things stand, I cannot do it.
I suppose I could get a handicapped placard but once on the way down that road, what is the difference between me and the President’s Julia?
The scorn that has greeted the fictional character is rich, and if you have not seen the original, and the multitude of parodies, I encourage you to take a look at an America I do not recognize.
Julia is a Caucasian web-designer, by the way, and her Medicare and Social Security do not appear to be in trouble, at least according to the captions on the PowerPoint presentation.
I don’t know how that works. There has to be something to change the trajectory of doom that those programs are on. Social Security, for example, will be bankrupt the year the fictional Julia turns 21. I will be 82, though the way things are going I doubt if that is going to be of great concern to anyone except the administer of my estate.
So why not apply for SSI Disability if it comes to that? Millions who have dropped out of the job market have done exactly that. I am not saying it is fraud, per se, since we all have our aches and pains. Growing old is not for sissies.
The bill to the taxpayer is around $200 Billion a year- or, what in simpler times, amounts to pretty much what Defense used to cost. Amazing. And it is increasing, particularly in the hard-to-quantify aspects of “pain” and “mental illness.”
So, while Julia fills me with awe (and contempt), I find some troubling parallels in the way simple self-interest makes one think. My pal in San Diego hates the military-industrial complex, and considers people like me parasites the same way Julia is. Between the other Big Government programs (military retirement, VA disability and education benefits, SSI, etc. etc. etc.) I am hardly the paragon of Libertarian small-government.
There is more than a whiff of hypocrisy in my protestations against unsustainable government spending when I fully intend to avail myself of getting what I can.
Of course, I could make the argument that I made a personal contract with the government for SSI, Medicare and the military benefits- which Julia did not. The deal was either non-negotiable (SSI & Medicare) or explicit and up front (the military retirement). In the former case, we have paid for our parent’s benefits as we went along. In the latter, the rules for eligibility were clear, and the formula for entitlement clearly earned.
But that doesn’t really matter if we destroy the currency, our savings and debase our meager investments in real property, does it?
I am still stunned by Julia campaign, and the attendant “Forward” slogan. Forward from what? Forward from Change?
This is so patently nonsensical that I worry that it is me who is crazy, and tone-deaf to boot.
(If you haven’t seen it, you should. A search will also harvest the bushel basket of parody. http://www.barackobama.com/life-of-julia)
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com