Yes. Everyone's likely to lose someone this winter. We are losing the Greatest Generation.
The cousin who died last week was one of the younger of the Greatest Generation in my extended family, born late enough to fit into the baby-boomer demographic. He'd been ill, with a rare, unexplained, possibly chemical-related disease (always lived on a farm), for about ten years; lived with a sister and brother-in-law, then moved into a nursing home as the disease progressed. Coronavirus hit the nursing home and the next thing I heard, another cousin drove up to show me the obituary in the newspaper.
It's sad; it's the end of an era. Still, it's not as if anyone had expected him to go back to work on his farm.
One of the most interesting parts of watching this whole news story play out--one mutation of puny little coronavirus does produce symptoms in humans--is observing how hard it is for people even to see what I see as an obvious, fact-based middle ground, once other people have seen some advantage to themselves in "polarizing" opinions between two fallacious extremes.
"Coronavirus is nothing, a hoax, not serious if you do get the disease, just a way for the losers of the last presidential election to steal this one." The losers of the last presidential election certainly did use coronavirus to steal, or buy, this one. It's nauseous. It's especially nauseous if you remember a time when the Democratic Party did have positive ideals that people used to vote for, rather than having to fall back on an unsustainable promise of free money to...I don't want to blog about this on the morning before a funeral, right? The exploitation of coronavirus scrapes a new bottom in the history of U.S. electioneering. At least the FDR campaign in my neighborhood handed poor people ten-dollar bills. But coronavirus is real; it's still a coronavirus, a disease "germ" that doesn't make most people feel ill at all, doesn't feel very unpleasant to most of those who notice it, and can go into fatal pneumonia very fast if an infected person lacks resistance to it.
"Coronavirus is deadly, and the only way you can be safe is to stay home watching anxiety-inducing TV broadcasts about how you must have a risky new experimental vaccine the minute the TV talking head tells you to." Piffle. Most of us can and should do quarantine. And when coronavirus has run its course, which should be in another month or two in my town, there will still be rhinovirus and flu and staph and strep and household mold. Most of us will still be walking disease cultures, contact with which will kill people with AIDS. Most of us can and should be thinking about ways to build more healthy interpersonal distance into schools and workplaces. But seriously, the only reason why we need to do COVID-19 quarantine is to protect a minority of very vulnerable people whose first concern still needs to be isolating themselves rather than trying to force everyone else to share their living conditions.
Most of us, in my town, have probably been exposed to the coronavirus by now. Many had that peculiar kind of cough in August and didn't even consider taking a day off work, because it's not as if a peculiar kind of cough affected our ability to do anything. I did the quarantine thing and blogged about it because I could, not because I wouldn't have been physically capable of working through the symptoms I had if I'd had an employer who insisted on it. Lots of people worked right through the dreaded COVID-19 and, because blood tests weren't offered, still don't have proof that we've had it, though we have. And most of us have continued to wear shoes that gave us more pain on the first day.
Infectious diseases are so not "one size fits all, one Big Government policy protects everybody." They are a very individual thing. It's like the way, in a past generation, most adults never noticed being infected with polio, some children had the infection but never noticed it either, a small minority (like my father) had a long hard time but survived, and a larger minority of children died.
Can people who are immune to coronavirus, whether they were born that way, built up resistance by having the disease, or have been vaccinated for it, still be immune carriers of the disease? Duh. Can the Pope be Catholic? Airborne diseases don't really need any living thing to carry them around; they can literally float about in the air but they survive longer on a warm body.
Vaccines protect the vaccinated, ONLY. (That is, when the vaccines work as promised, which is not as often as pharmaceutical companies want to believe.) When disease pathogens float through the air, they can be carried as easily on a body that's fully immune to them as on a body that's suffering from the disease. Maybe more so, because fully immune bodies move around more.
If you want to protect your elders, when any airborne infection is going around, don't get close to them.
If they don't want to be protected...they may have a point. Some vulnerable people can pull through a season when they need to isolate themselves, and recover their health and the level of social activity they consider normal, if they isolate themselves when they need to. Others are going to get sicker and die, whatever they do. It's not unreasonable that some of these people, having heard that coronavirus is likely to take them out in hours or days rather than months of ever-increasing pain and mess, are agitating for one last big family gathering. They're hoping someone will bring in that coronavirus. Can they be blamed?
I think our Governor is overreacting, trying to signal virtue more than actually thinking about what can help people. Curfews for adults? Well, the most obvious effect those have is to generate protest demonstrations. Among activists there's a traditional, unofficial rotation system for such things. You can be arrested for nonviolent protests ("interfering with traffic," "disorderly conduct," "trespassing" by remaining in a public place after being ordered to leave, etc.) and pay a symbolic fine only so many times before people start to consider your offenses as serious bad citizenship. I'm not going to use up my symbolic arrests protesting a quarantine order. But young people who want to resume group activities with their dates are likely to think that's worth being arrested for. Young people usually have high resistance to most infections. Young people who do not have high resistance to infections usually don't know that they're in real danger at events like the laugh-at-coronavirus demonstrations.
More seriously...really small towns in Virginia, like mine, have had an unofficial curfew culture for a long time, a feeling that--because none of our police officers wants to hang out in the police station all night, playing solitaire, waiting to see if anyone calls to report suspicious noises that turn out to be squirrels on the roof--polite and public-spirited people will just stay home in bed at night, and let the police do likewise. Making the curfew official might appear, to the Governor and to some tired cops and their families, as a way to expand this sense that "everybody will be nice and postpone their legal or illegal activities until daylight" into the big cities. If it's illegal to be driving, shopping, or drinking at one o'clock in the morning then most of the police force can get their sleep at night. People who get their sleep at night are likely to be more efficient and level-headed in the daytime. Don't we all want police officers to be efficient and level-headed?
I can empathize with that point of view but I don't agree with it. Nobody has a right to tell other people when they ought to go to sleep and wake up. If the American voters and taxpayers were willing to accept other people's rules about that, a lot more of us would have gone to church colleges, and probably a majority of us would still be living with our parents,
Bad political decisions are breaking out all over, and acrimony, "polarization," personal ill will, censorship and cyberbullying...mercy. Seriously, Gentle Readers, I think a lot of this may actually be coming from the coronavirus. Many people become grumpy when they're fighting the flu. We don't directly feel our bodies starting to pump more antibodies through our blood; one of the indirect things we may feel when that happens is a surge in biochemicals associated with feelings of wariness, defensiveness, a general readiness to fight. We may have to remind ourselves that transferring this "fight" energy into unnecessary quarrels with other people actually interferes with the fighting our bodies need to be doing, against the microscopic "enemies within," the virus.
The word on the streets in my town, in the last week of this October, was "Democrats like Senator Warner are trying to get another handout check sent to you and me, and mean, Grinchy Republicans like the Orange Thing from New York are trying to prevent that." In the heart of Kilgore Country I saw an outbreak of Biden signs in people's yards. In the first week of November I heard, "Congress agreed to those second handout checks, and the Orange Thing vetoed them." From what reliable sources posted online, this was an exaggeration, but it bought many votes. Why would Trump have allowed this to happen? If he'd seriously wanted to stay in the White House, even if he'd intended to veto the second handout checks (for which there were valid economic reasons) later, why didn't he have enough sense to waffle about wanting to authorize those handouts, planning to authorize them after blah blah? He's an unlovable man by all accounts, but not a stupid one--like Nixon in that way, I think. I could believe that he made the stupid decision to oppose giving money to takers, right before an election, because he had the coronavirus. His body was in "fight" mode and his unconscious mind would have been going, go home to bed go home to bed go home to bed...
Meanwhile, Republican loyalists are saying, why aren't people paying more attention to the historic fact that Trump participated in negotiations for peace in the Middle East? Well, that's a question I can answer. From what Americans have been hearing for at least sixty years, the Middle East is one big war zone. If you believe that modern Israelis are the people who were to be blessed and protected as Abraham's heirs, you may find yourself supporting some decisions of modern Israeli leaders that don't sound much like anything Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob ever did. If you believe that Arabs are physical descendants of Abraham too, and the people who were to be blessed and protected were the ones who preserved Abraham's legacy of faith in One God who prefers mercy to sacrifice--beliefs with which this web site agrees--then you probably see no hope of ever understanding what Middle Easterners are quarrelling about, don't want to take sides, and just wish they'd work it out nonviolently among themselves. If Trump did make it possible for them to do that, he'll certainly deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. I hope he did; I hope he gets one. I believe God had a good purpose for every life God created and it would be very good if Donald Trump were able to serve his purpose. But the prize will probably be awarded posthumously. We'll believe that Middle Easterners are capable of living in peace when we see it.
As for poor old Biden...this web site really doesn't want to pick on him, because what this web site saw of his campaign gave us an impression that putting him into the White House would be cruel. He's entitled to want to die with his boots on. I respect that attitude. Unfortunately, a vote for the harmless old fellow who comes across as having to make such heroic efforts just to read a speech off a Teleprompter was a vote for the radical from California.
As a web site, this web site has not reached an official position about Kamala Harris. As a part-time political blogger, however, I will say that I have reasons to dislike her more than I do most politicians. Normally they either eagerly send us press releases, which we dutifully reblog, or ignore us in a very polite and tactful way. Harris is the only pol who's ever been so overtly hostile as to block me. That's a very, very bad sign for the country that's let her get as far as Vice-President-Elect. She doesn't know me personally; she just blocked me, automatically, when I visited her campaign site and requested information about her campaign platform. She does not believe the federal government has any obligation to serve citizens who don't belong to their own party. So, although I think Biden fits into the White House decor better than the Orange Thing, I'm still hoping the electoral college will do its duty to the nation and keep Harris out, even if it means four more years of seeing orange.
It was a vile election in every way. It's been, in most ways, a bad year.
Faith, hope for the nation? I wish this web site had some to offer.
No, it's not just that we've lost the most lovable member of the team. When people enter cyberspace with a screen name that begins with "Grandma," that's an indication that you need to be prepared for them to retire or die any day. We don't like it, but we did expect to outlive Grandma Bonnie Peters. We almost lost Yona, and can give thanks that at least that didn't happen. Other, more anticipated, unpleasant things have happened to other members of the site, and at least they've survived. And though I expected any reduction in glyphosate exposure would do wonders for my health and be helpful to Adayahi, I've been thrilled to see just how helpful it's been; that dear old man's improvement has exceeded everyone's hopes.
But for the nation...the Bible tells us that nations get the leaders they deserve. For many years the United States has been practicing the great sin of Sodom. No, that's not the physical act of sodomy, although the Bible says nothing good about that either. In Sodom only a few young men wanted to rape the two male visitors. The women and older men of the city were, however, guilty of not caring about visitors, doing nothing to protect them, taking no responsibility for the well-being of others. That was the great sin of the whole city, for which the whole city was destroyed.
We have let ourselves be so "polarized" about the dichotomy of unethical "Communists" and unethical capitalists that we've overlooked the individual moral mandate to use whatever wealth we have in an unselfish way, for the good of all. A mainstream Republican, not especially rich by U.S. standards but obscenely rich by global standards, says, "I pay taxes! That ought to be enough! I can wish younger, smaller, newer entrepreneurs well, even give them good advice, without having to sponsor them as well--I'm old and tired!" As I type she's probably sitting in a church, receiving the soothing message that she's a better Christian than those of us who are not in that church at this moment. And the annoying part is that, although she looks and acts and probably feels much older than I am, she's only five years older; we're at the age where the difference between HSP and non-HSP starts to show--they age faster. I believe she really is tired. She married more money than she earned, but she's earned a lot. She has the right to use that money as she chooses. She cannot, ethically or morally, be forced to invest any of it in any new venture in or out of our town. She can and should be called to account, politically, for her contribution to a more general greedhead tendency that has taken out the middle tier--when people like me can afford to move up from open-air markets into stores, the town council needs to ensure that stores are available to us--but all she can really be required to do is to keep out of our way.
Just as, long ago, a few dozen twenty-something females, resident of the dormitory reserved for "more mature students" at Berea College, very reasonably wanted to go on studying when we heard screams out in the shrubbery behind the dormitory. I remember thinking, "Oh those stupid freshmen, when will they ever learn to stop screaming before they are hurt?" as I got up and closed the window. I could hear other windows closing all over the building. We all could hear that the voice crying for help was not familiar to any of us and was not calling any of us by name. We could hear the words "Help!" and "Stop!" and "Shut up!" We all had final exams to study for. We all had telephones, constantly connected to the main line, no batteries or charges per minute to bother about. We could have stood up and called either the campus police or the town police with just one or two more steps than it took to close the windows. Nobody bothered. Somebody else's little sister, the same age as my sisters, was beaten and raped about ten yards from where my whole dormitory exercised our legal, moral, ethical right to concentrate on studying for our exams, every one of us thinking that if the kid really did need help someone else would surely provide it. Every one of us participated in the female version of the great sin of Sodom.
I have at least tried to be a more responsible adult, since that day. I have undeniably done more in that direction, with less, than most people have done or tried to do. Maybe I could or should have done more good than I did. Certainly, in a nation where the sin of Sodom was less widespread, I would have had a great deal more resources to do good with.
I've often asked why God made me a writer and gave me a home in the very core of North America's confusion about economic morality. I have no idea. My writing career does show a nice linear progression forward but it's not been accompanied by wealth. I still have to prod people to pay me for writing things, regularly, when like most writers I feel that they ought to be paying me in advance.
(Some people do, like the person who drove up yesterday to deliver a cash payment to Queen Cat Serena for more Petfinder posts. Serena doesn't seem more interested in cash than she is in computers, but she will be thanking you, in her way. As do I.)
Well...God is not a reliable source of simple answers to this kind of questions. Only once, when asking why God hadn't helped in a situation, did I even receive that quick visual impression of the sick patient's crippled hands, that insight that we mortals who are the living Body of Christ have become too sick and feeble to do what we ought to do for one another.
I think part of the answer may be that, even though some people point out that Bible characters are always addressed as members of families, tribes, and nations, Bible characters are also held accountable for "working out their own salvation" as individuals. None of us can save another. None of us is responsible for another's choices.
Years ago I asked people to help me write a book about how well it's possible to live on the same income that a typical U.S. welfare cheat claimed to be unable to live on: $12,000 per year. $1000 per month. I caught hate from Yahoo for writing an article about that topic. There are corrections that we should take seriously, and then there are hatespews that tell us we're doing the right thing, so I wanted to write the book. I set up a GoFundMe site and shared it with all the e-friends and writers I follow on Twitter.
Two writers responded.
A woman in the United States, also writing about frugality, said $1000 per month was too easy. Too many working Americans are living on less than able-bodied welfare recipients demand.
A man who lives in both countries, but is originally British, said a lot of frugal middle-aged people growing old graciously didn't sound like "fun" to him. Well, the exchange wasn't private, and he's too successful to be a private citizen any more, so why not mention his name? It was Neil Gaiman, whose unique mix of horror, comedy, and wonderment continues to delight me whenever I can get one of his books.
I thought, "Well, I know a lot of people who do not care for his unique mix of horror, comedy, and wonderment, who would think a book about frugal middle-aged people growing old graciously was a lot more fun than a book about creepy neighbors wanting to sew buttons over or in place of a child's eyes..."
Those who do think Gaiman's instant bestseller sounds like fun, and don't already have it, may use this link to buy it:
https://amzn.to/3nfIuaD .
"...But in this great big complicated world, everybody has their own purpose to fulfill, and different taste is part of the way they know what that purpose is. Why should Gaiman fund my book? I don't write like him. I'm not related to him. I'm not from his town. Let him choose to fund only horror-comedy-fantasy book projects, or only books by British male writers, or only writers whose first names start with C for all I care. People who want to read my book are the ones who ought to fund it, and people who want to read my book would be a different group than people who want to read Gaiman's books, despite some overlap. The literary influences on my book are different; Wendell Berry, C.S. Lewis, Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Henry David Thoreau, even Edward Abbey come to mind. Their fans would be the ones who are meant to fund my book."
So in other words I wanted to write in the genre or tradition of a lot of writers who had retired, died, or at least become old. Maybe that was a clue. I hope not. That's still my favorite kind of book to write or to read. Anyway, the fans of those older writers did not use the GoFundMe. After a few years I decided to work with the clue the American writer had handed me and write about living on an utterly unreasonable, unsustainable income of US$2000 a year--or less. At least nobody could ever say that was too easy, and I'd been doing it.
Well, after I'd written enough of that book to know I was going to finish it, the first thing that happened was that, between the coronavirus handout, an arts-and-crafts grant I got for my knitting, and such work as I was able to do, my income immediately rose above $2000 for the year I was writing about. I don't feel that that's invalidated the book since my income was below $2000 for each of the preceding eleven years, and since it's not exactly risen into what I'd consider a sustainable level, anyway. I took it as an encouraging sign.
Meanwhile, we-as-a-nation continue to misunderstand, very willfully, the plight of our...less fortunate. Poverty in America continues to be a very different thing from poverty in Haiti; by global standards many of our less fortunate cannot really be described as poor, except in the sense of "so useless and pathetic they don't even know how to survive on $12,000 a year, like that fellow who admitted to a newspaper reporter that he was sleeping on a broken-down bed because he didn't know how to cut a piece of plywood." Well, actually some of these people are stuck in situations where they can't survive on $12,000 a year, not because they're useless and pathetic but because they are stuck; that's part of the problem. Meanwhile, when your "needs" are things like computers that run Zoom, degrees from big-name universities, dental implants, day care for children while you work at yuppie jobs, more reliable cars, and other things North Americans believe everybody needs, you're not poor. At least on the Internet, which is global, "poor" ought to describe people whose "needs" are things like food, water, shoes, and safe places to spread out blankets on the ground at night. As a direct result of North American capitalism and North American Christianity, there aren't nearly as many really poor people in the world as there used to be--even though there are more people, overall.
Anyway, we all know that there are people out there like...oh, say the mothers of the two adorable children who hang out after school, sometimes, at our local cafe. They're not exactly homeless waifs on bombed-out streets. They're daughters of privilege. They went to college, they obviously took hot showers and put on fresh clean work shirts in their nice houses and dropped their children off at an above-average school before they reported to work, they've accepted relatively low-paid part-time jobs as a trade-off for living in a place where the cost of living is low and they can be close to their families. They have pretty teeth, well-educated accents, and nice clean new-looking shoes. And when their work hours keep being cut further and further back, they lie in bed thinking about what they're going to lose and how much harm it's going to do their children, and they feel terrible. They could survive without a great number of things that they have, but they're not accustomed to doing without telephones, computers, cars, electricity, or being able to bribe the children to behave well with trinkets, so they'd miss those things. If they make the wrong choices about what to give up, and when, they might lose their homes. Or their children.
Nobody wants those things to happen; yet, partly because the coronavirus is real, partly because the coronavirus panic exploited by the minority party was such a scam, they're happening, and they're likely to continue happening all winter. People are committing suicide over losses of income. The American middle class, who are by global standards disgustingly rich, just can't bear the thought of becoming the American poor, who are by global standards pretty dang comfortable. Well, for one thing, nobody wants to admit it but we all know it's true, the American welfare state is not going to be able to keep every unemployed adult comfortable for very long. If more people aren't paying in than are taking out, the welfare system is doomed to crash, and then our poor people may find out what real poverty feels like.
One thing people aren't prepared to find, when their income has reached a point that really does allow food insecurity to occur, is that when they finally have enough to help others, it makes other people awfully uncomfortable. (It's a scream, actually.) Holding checks for a total of $2200, I thought, "Of course this means I have to give $220 to charity. The church? Well, let's let this be a sign: If the pastor or secretary of a church is willing to cash either of these checks, thus sparing me the inconvenience of opening a temporary bank account just because some people are too lazy to mail out postal money orders instead of blank-blank bleep-bleep checks, that church gets the $220." I called the church closest to me, the one where the aforementioned Republican is probably walking out as I type this. None of the Baptists wanted to talk about it. My beliefs are closer to theirs than the other legitimate churches in town, but I respect those churches' beliefs and good works too, so I called them too. None of them called back either.
So I was still considering what to do with the $220 when I went online and found the man I encouraged to set up a GoFundMe:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/uber-driver-attacked-medical-bills-aid . All I know about him is what I read in a legitimate local newspaper's web site. Miguel Ochoa of Arizona, age 44, father of six, owner of a small store, had the dreaded coronavirus earlier this year and lost his store. So he was doing gigs and odd jobs, including driving for Uber, to support the children (I know, way too many children, but it's too late to do anything about that now). He felt uneasy about hauling two guys who seemed to be drunk, but Uber tempted him with the promise of a bonus, so he let them get into his car. Then they got nasty enough that he stopped the car and told them to get out. Then they beat him up. He went back to work as soon as he was released from the hospital, but not for Uber.
I said, "Now there's a role model for those of Generation X who think they can't survive losing any of their wealth. Unless a local crisis comes up first, that young man" (same age as my sisters) "is getting the $220." He is, too, if he tells me where to mail the postal money order.
"Oh, please, writer-known-as-Priscilla, de-ar, nobody expects you to donate ten percent of your income to anything. You need it," some people may want to whine if they're still reading this. To those people I say: Bosh. Moses had a better understanding of how a small, poor nation could become even a player on the global scene of its day than anyone currently practicing economics, and Moses said nothing about any "needs" when he told his small, poor nation that each of them should give one-tenth of whatever they had to those even worse off than themselves. Even if some of what they had had come out of the same fund to which they were giving their tenth-of-the-crop back. Plenty of people whose incomes are low don't want to give anything to anyone else. We are not told what, if anything, Jesus said to them but we are told what he said to a very poor person who did the right thing and gave a nearly valueless coin called a mite to the poor fund. He said that the worth of her mite was greater than the worth of the rich people's shares.
One way we might reduce the incidence of suicide, in young people facing their fears of poverty, is to start thinking of even the genuinely poor as having worth rather than "needs." Consider what they have to give to others. Look for ways to reward their good work, rather than feeding "needs."
I don't like "needs." Like most English-speaking people I do use the word "need" in the usual, casual way: "I need a postage stamp to mail this letter, so I'll need to go to the post office." "If we make that trip we'll need to plan to..." "I need three more minutes to finish what I'm doing." But in a more serious sense, I do think, and people may hate me for this if they so choose: nobody really needs anything. "People need oxygen to survive." Yes, but why do they need to survive? There are more humans on this planet than it needs. Maybe the people who are fixated on "needs," who aren't thinking about worth and about the fair exchanges that build relationships that motivate others to care about their preference to survive, should be decomposing and turning into something more pleasant, like dandelions. I say this, not to encourage more suicides, but to encourage more of the reasonably comfortable to be more mindful of the way they talk to those who have less. Nobody needs anything in the ultimate sense; toward your purpose of doing good rather than harm, you need to stop babbling about "needs" and start reminding those who have less than you that they have worth.
Maybe the change we need, for the purpose of surviving as a nation, is to stop letting ourselves be "polarized" between godless "Communism" and soulless capitalism, and consider the ethical dimension. Maybe we need to remember what we've lost. More complicated economic systems built by more sophisticated cultures have certainly evolved, but they've not really changed, and won't survive efforts to change, that primal mandate that each of us take responsibility for our own adult lives, earn rewards for our work and use what we earn to reward other people's good work.
Wanting to let a bloated government feed the "needs" of poor people, without any personal responsibility for integrating those who have less back into the local economic community, has been our national sin. The collapse of our democratic republic, the sort of socialist tyranny some of our young people claim to want and others may taunt and bait but are not working to prevent, is likely to be our national punishment.
Some of us still claim to want to believe that countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, even Russia and China, sank into poverty under Marxism because those mean old North American capitalists cut off financial aid to them. How interesting that, before going socialist, those countries were rich, and needed no financial aid from anybody. In the nineteenth century Americans referred to the wealth of Russia as the example of vast unimaginable wealth. Iraq was once known by the name of its once-great city, Babylon, and it once ruled the civilized world. The development of Venezuela's natural wealth into financial wealth really started with oil, and in a few short years socialism has reduced oilmen to hoarding toilet paper. There's no particular reason to doubt that if the United States go socialist we'll soon be as miserable as the huddled masses of other countries that have fallen for this unworkable, unsustainable idea. There's no particular reason to doubt that, when envious foreigners urge socialism upon us, that's their intention.
Yes, Sweden exists. Sweden is a unique and fascinating nation. One reason why it's survived socialism as well as it has is a sparse population, produced by having been able to send the surplus population it once had to the United States. Since no nation now has that option, there's no reason to imagine that any nation will be able to replicate Sweden's economic miracle in the foreseeable future. And even in Sweden there's evidence that socialism, if continued, will destroy even that economy.
For the purpose of our national survival I think we need to be making rapid progress away from the kind of unofficial, experimental socialism we've had in the twentieth century. I didn't let myself mention this before age fifty. At thirty I publicly stated that, like most baby-boomers, I liked letting the Social Security system provide more money for my elders than I could have done. At ten, however, I'd been taught that the Social Security system worked for as long as the working generation greatly outnumbered the "retired" generation; that that demographic situation was bound to change, and when it did, Social Security would implode. It's changing now. I would like to see the United States preserve some sort of financial safety net for people who really are disabled. I'm not pleased to see how many of my generation seem to want to believe that we, as a generational demographic, can sustain Social Security by allowing mass immigration, when the young people who are already here are already overcrowded and underemployed. Mass immigration might be a nice idea in some other century but it cannot work now. I think we need to say no to all handouts from government to able-bodied people. I've been saying that since the old AC days, and I've caught plenty of hate for saying it--and that hate is one reason why I'm convinced it's true. I wouldn't have mentioned this before I'd lived on an income far below what the career "needers" demand, for years. I want to say this as a person below the poverty line, and close to "retirement" age: We as a nation need to repent of socialism. We need to forsake socialism. If we want to survive.
Biden won't help. Harris will do her worst to aggravate the impending hard times. Trump wouldn't help, either, even if the electoral college agreed to discard the results of an election bought by misleading rumors and appoint Trump president. The only thing that might help, so far as I can see, would be for Americans (yes, including those in the other nations, in their own ways) to start thinking about making real economic progress...along the lines of a popular quote from a former President who was never considered "conservative" in his own lifetime:
ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU.
ASK WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR COUNTRY.
If a critical mass of Americans agree to reaffirm our own worth rather than pleading our "needs," we might still have a chance to keep American Democracy alive.
