Readers and writers blog

I love working for Uncle.

As with a lot of government jobs, I don’t do too much (well, I do support my local economy) and he pays me once a month, just like clockwork.

You might say I’m secure . . . socially secure.

True, my Social Security income, even though it’s near the maximum benefit, is only about half what my job was paying before I retired. On the other hand, I don’t have to drive to work every day, buy a lunch somewhere, drink overpriced beverages from vending machines, buy coworkers overpriced drinks when the pressure of the day is over — or wear clothes more expensive than the cheap sweatsuits I lounge around in while writing this deathless prose (you know the joke — deathless because it never lived).

The only money withheld from Social Security is for Medicare (no, it’s not free if you sign up for Part B for outpatient care, and you’d be an idiot not to), and that’s a lot less than I was paying for company insurance that wasn’t as good. Also, I no longer pay union dues. Also — and this is a big one — Social Security benefits aren’t taxed as high as private-sector income.

So, I watch my nickels, dimes and dollars (pennies aren’t worth watching any more) and live a fairly comfortable life that, while it may have no frills, is pretty much the no-frills life I lived before I retired.

Now listen, you Gen Xers, Yers and Zers, I don’t want to hear you complain about having to pay into Social Security so that I can live my modest life. I paid into that system for 40 years, so don’t whine at me until you’re in your 60s and have done the same.

Besides, I just found out I’m going to have to pay 2,000 bucks to fix the transmission in my 14-year-old car while you’re driving around in models from the 21st century.

And don’t listen to those who say you won’t have any benefits by the time you retire. Social Security will be just fine, and those who predict its demise are capitalist fat cats who want to get your contributions into the stock market so they can steal them legally. We could have fixed Social Security a hundred times in the past eight years with the money our current government has wasted just on its war, one that’s enriching all its friends.

We have a government that doesn’t believe in government. I do. But it has to be good government — in other words, one that isn’t run by them.

I’m grateful for my current life of relative comfort. And I’m grateful to the relative — a red, white and blue Uncle symbolizing generations of believers in good government — who made it possible.

An update

I wrote last week about losing the link to Mike’s Circular File, but I have now reconnected. It turns out that if you use our blogroll page to link to its listings, you never lost the connection. The reason I did is that I keep a separate blogroll listing to avoid opening our website more than I have to. Mike’s address on this separate listing was an old link to Comcast that he has now dropped.

Glad to be back with you, Mike. Unfortunately, the other link I wrote about — Robert Lashley’s The literary thug — is still missing. I hope Robert is well.

Today in our Works section

• Chapter 24: Speedway Meadows of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard wanders into a rock concert where he runs into Ginny, who then gets into another drunken incident with the police. Her father’s lawyer gets her out of jail and cleared of an assault charge.

• Chapter 12 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess learns from a phone call in the middle of the night that her former mother-in-law has died — a woman who introduced her to the beauty of art, a woman she loved. But Tess cannot go to the funeral because there she would face a man she loved, her ex-husband.

– Sid Leavitt