One
of the saving graces of writing a blog is that it doesn't really
matter what you write about, because almost no one is reading it.
During
the entire 20th Century the world seemed to be in imminent
danger of running off the rails and into the gorge all at once,
ending in a huge, fiery explosion and killing just about everybody.
Everything about the 20th Century, including the
prosperous bits, had an air of mania and desperation about it. The
21st Century, so far, has not been like that.
Not
that it has necessarily gotten any better. If the previous century
threatened sudden obliteration, our new century settles for the slow
death of everything that we need to live. The environment; our
infrastructure; food crops; the existence of fish; the social
contract; our peace of mind; democratic norms; the medical standard
of care; education for our children; our government and the
governments of many countries around the world; effective
pharmaceuticals; all concepts of privacy or security; all in a state
of slow, quiet degradation, culminating perhaps in unburied death, or
maybe just mass casualties and sheer misery for those poor souls
remaining alive. The old air of mania and desperation has been
replaced by despair and depression. Mania and desperation evidently
required hope, a commodity that has become functionally extinct. I'm
thinking that yes, Mr. Sacks was right when he sang his little song.
“The whole world is shitty.”
Why
Today, Mr. Fred?
What's
so special about today? Why pick today to get your knickers in a
twist and harsh everyone's mellow? Choosing one thing from the vast
catalog of nightmarish horror that besets us would not only be
impossible, it would also be a waste of time to try. Like rearranging
the deck chairs on the half-sunken Titanic. Nobody seems very well
informed about the extent of the problem, and very few people who
have had a glimpse of it appear to be overly concerned.
Most
people are either oblivious, or they believe that the world has
always been like this, teetering on the edge of destruction. There
have always been fluctuations in weather, haven't there? There have
always been wars, and the threat of more wars. There has always been
disease, in fact the disease part was much, much worse in olden
times! This very Pollyanna-like attitude very optimistically holds
that humanity has been through worse, and it has always prevailed.
Trump? That's nothing! We've survived Caligula, Napoleon, and Hitler!
Well
no, honey-child, the blogger patiently explained, nothing like our
life-threatening 21st Century has ever happened before.
There has never been man-made warming of the atmosphere and the
oceans before, not on this or any other scale. It simply has never
happened before. There have never been seven billion people living on
the earth at one time before. Something like three billion of them
are under forty-years-old. There has never before been a commercial
human society that was willing to stake its entire future on the
efficacy of fiat currency (the idea that money is worth whatever
people will pay for it, and no longer grounded in any kind of
equivalency computation). There has never been a time when technology
and productivity have made such giant leaps on such accelerating time
scales, and in a related development, there has never been a time
when the prosperity generated by lesser advances was not shared with
working people.
So,
why today? What was the straw that broke the camel's back? There
wasn't one. The cumulative effect of just every damn thing requires
me to let off some steam once in a while, lest the entire engine blow
sky high.
There
are, however, things great or small that push my anxiety level up
more or less permanently.
Social
Security
My
blood pressure goes up every time a correspondence from the Social
Security Administration hits my mailbox. To be fair, I visited their
office in the Federal Building in West Los Angeles a few years ago
and a very nice man helped me quickly and efficiently after a very
reasonable wait in a comfortable lounge area. I have also received
timely assistance from a very nice man in the SS office in Manila, in
the Philippines. I was very grateful for their assistance, and I
thanked them effusively. There have been problems that arrived in the
mail, though, and I am nine time zones away from California. Even
Manila would be an expensive, time consuming, international visit.
The real problem is that the entire enterprise is unwieldy,
inefficient, probably running Cobal on sixty year old computers, the
left hand rarely knows what the right hand is doing, and no one above
the level of the two gentlemen who assisted me in person cares what
happens at all.
Here's
a good example. I turned sixty-five several years ago and got the
materials for Medicare. I read them carefully and decided to sign up
for parts A and B only. I live overseas, and I have no plans ever to
reside in America again, so the odds are that I will never receive
any Medicare benefits at all, because our congress, in their rush to
please American companies at the expense of the working man, has
mandated that only medical services rendered within the United States
may be offset by Medicare. Note that Medicare would save a fortune
paying for care provided in my local market, rather than the four or
five times that amount for work done in the U.S., but that's another
story. I signed up on the off chance that I might come down with
something downright horrible, like Parkinson's Disease, or ALS, or
something like that. A life sentence with a ton of money required
every month. There are huge penalties when you say no to Medicare at
sixty-five and then want to sign up later.
I
paid them for the first year out of pocket, about $1,300, and then
when my Social Security kicked in I had the money deducted every
month. It went on that way for years.
Last
week I got the notice in the mail telling me that my benefit amount
was being raised by some insignificant amount. The form also showed a
breakdown of my benefit and any deductions therefrom. THERE WERE NO
DEDUCTIONS LISTED. And sure enough, this month's direct deposit was
in the exact amount of the new benefit. Like I mentioned, they had
been taking out over one hundred dollars every month for years for
Medicare, and during that time I have received mail from Medicare,
and I possess a Medicare members card. On its own motion, the Social
Security Administration dropped me from Medicare.
This
is the level of consideration that we can expect from our government.
That much is disturbing, but I quickly realized that I'm better off
without it. I'll take the $1,300 every year, thank you, and I'll save
it to pay for medical services over here. They'll be keeping the
$6,000 that they essentially stole from me in the five years that
they let me keep paying every month, but we can't let little things
like that ruin our precious days. We've got bigger fish to fry.
Our
Government In General
Nothing
about Washington DC is recognizable when compared with the government
that existed only sixty years ago. That was a smaller country, only
200,000,000 people or so, and everything moved at a much slower pace.
Communications, transportation, everything. People got jobs and kept
them, often for their entire lives. Almost everyone who was working
had a policy of Blue Cross/Blue Shield medical insurance that covered
all family members. If someone in your family was crazy, there was a
government hospital for that. For my parents generation, the money
that their parents received from Social Security was enough to live
on. Cars, refrigerators, TVs, they were all made in America. Things
were much tougher for black Americans, and if anyone among our family
or friends was homosexual, we didn't know about it, but in general
things were more cooperative and secure than they are today.
Now
we live in a “you're on your own” nightmare. The difference is
that equality has been replaced by liberty. Equality, paid for by
fair employment practices and progressive taxes, has given way to a
system in which the rich are at liberty to keep almost all of their
money and corporations are at liberty to gouge workers as terribly as
possible and reduce thereby their overhead. Every American is free to
sign up for all of the medical insurance that he or she can afford,
and if you can't afford any, well, then you don't have any. We still
receive Social Security benefits, but it's not enough for anyone to
live on. We get Medicare, but if you get sick enough the co-pays and
the medicine will suck almost anyone's bank account dry in a couple
of years, probably including the equity in your house, if you are
lucky enough to have any. After that, it seems like the plan becomes,
sell the house, move into an RV, and work until you die. I've noticed
that more and more people are going to Mexico for affordable medical
treatment. (You may be surprised to find out that the dentists and
doctors are excellent in Mexico, and the quality of the care is very
high.) More Americans, myself included, are choosing to live
overseas.
Welcome
to the 21st Century! If you're not living in a van and
working seasonal jobs in Amazon warehouses, you're way ahead of the
game.
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