Jesus, Mary and Joseph at the Social Security office

I spent three hours waiting in the local Social Security office recently. I was there because the lady at the 800 number said I had to go since she could not resolve my problem, namely no longer getting a monthly check.

I had already tried the web page with no luck. The local SS manager had come to my Rotary Club in Nashua a couple of years ago and strongly recommended we do everything over the net. She said that SS had fewer employees that year than they had in 1960 and more people were retiring in a month today than they were then. Well, I tried to no avail.

I actually located a telephone number for my local SS office and called. The lady that eventually answered said that appointments were currently running out eight weeks. I could make an appointment and hope I lived that long or I could come in and take my chances.

I decided to head into the office.

I had actually waited in an SS office in Nashua, NH a few years back when I made my arrangements to collect Social Security. What I found locally was not dissimilar. The outer office looked like the reception area in a county lockup. You pressed some buttons on a computer screen then collected your number and sat down to wait.

The receptionist was locked up behind darkened glass, no doubt bullet-proof, and the seats were full of very odd looking folks. Not all, by any means, were elderly. My number was called, I explained what I thought might be the problem to the receptionist, and I was told to take a seat and wait until I could be called into the “inner sanctum” and meet with a specialist.

People fidgeted, some walked around, some held loud and confused conversations with the receptionist and each other. The security guard watched it all and occasionally rose to stand next to a particularly upset customer.

Who were all these people? It finally dawned on me after listening to a young fellow explain how he had to get rid of his sister as his SS payee because she refused to spend his money on the drugs he needed.

These folks are on Social Security Disability because they are crazy, alcoholics, and/or drug addicts. Seriously.

I would recommend Social Security be empowered to have nice offices with friendly staff for old people with problems with the old age pensions.  There could be other offices for the drug addicted and the crazy where people yell and scream and explain about the poisonous chemicals on their toilet seats put there by Martians.

It’s enough to make a guy consider aluminum foil for a hat!

Some I like, some I don't

Some things about Ron Paul’s politics are so attractive to me I almost want to kiss the old geezer. The non-interventionist foreign policy, ending our role as policeman to the world, and the decriminalization of drugs seem just so sensible. And who hasn’t shaken their mental fist at the Fed?

On the other hand, he’s also in favor of cutting government to the point where it will not be able to help anyone that truly needs it. The mentally ill already wander around getting very little help and under Dr. Paul they, along with everyone with a special need, would be left to fend for themselves. He’s an advocate of the gold standard. The guy thinks paper money is phony money. He wouldn’t support education or half a dozen other important federal initiatives like health and research.

In addition, this fellow is as old as the hills. He’s sharp, no doubt about it. But if I had to bet on him lasting through a first term as President I would have to think about it twice.

Happy New Year, American voters

The holidays are over, my brief relationship seems to have ended, so I'm back and I'm cranky, very cranky.

Just so we are clear: the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary election are a racket to boost the economies of both states at the expense of the nation as a whole. This comment comes from a guy who lived in NH for 30 years and tripped over more presidential candidates than most.

Once, having breakfast in a diner in Milford, NH, we were visited by three candidates while our eggs got cold. My brother John, from Massachusetts, finally asked if we ever considered shooting them.

And I have to admit it was fun sending my daughter out to get info for her school report by visiting with an unknown presidential candidate from Arkansas (Bill Clinton). Retail politics the pundits call it and it is a ridiculous concept in this day and age.

Do you really think all those fat, white, well-off, pig farming, ethanol producing social conservatives from Iowa are making a choice for president that the rest of this nation will follow? So far they have been wrong every time.

The local TV stations make a ton of money off the candidate’s ads. So their talking heads go wild spouting the critical importance of every statement, misstatement, and declaration of a group of people who will end up as foot notes to foot notes in history books. Whichever candidate is spending the most at the time is seen as the new front runner.

Everyone with a grain of sense has known since 2008 that Mitt Romney would be the Republican Presidential candidate in 2012. There is no mystery, no question. But that approach does not generate ad dollars and the false hope required to get these candidates to spend all that money for nothing.

New Hampshire and Iowa will never give up this golden goose that fills second rate motel rooms and greasy diners as well as newspaper and television coffers voluntarily. The national parties and the voters as a whole will have to finally put this dog down.

Restricting national political campaigns to a 6 month period with one national primary would be a good start.

What ails America, part B

Health hysteria, individual or environmental, is everywhere. Actually, rampant I believe. I used to think this foolishness was confined to dopey, ex-hippies who claimed to be sensitive to or negatively impacted by all sorts of things in life. Or generated by the Cosmic Organics people who developed a rash if they inadvertently ate a tomato from Chile.

Nowadays, my local Senior Center has notices on the doors saying you cannot wear any scent in the building. People near where I live claim they get vertigo from a wind turbine located at some distance from their homes. Others claim their children misbehave because of it. A lady I know says she gets headaches from RF waves and won’t let the gas company put a new meter on her house.

There are reasons New England has the highest gasoline, home heating and electricity rates in the country. Proposals to build refineries are always defeated, off or on shore LNG terminals are protested, wind turbine farms are in court for ten years, high tension electricity lines are halted.

I remember when a new soccer fields or park or library was thought to be a good thing for the town. Not anymore. NIMBY rules the land. An elderly couple here recently halted construction of a mixed housing development because it would be on land behind their house and they wanted the land, although it is privately owned, to remain undeveloped regardless of the general welfare.

The larger issue, of course, is that we, as a country, as a society, are totally unable to determine what would be in our overall best interests and proceed from there. We use the Interstate Highway System every day but are resigned to the fact that it could not be built, and certainly cannot be expanded, today. We complain about the cost of gas and electricity and heating oil but we refuse to do anything that would help to reduce those costs. If the proposal adversely affects one nut, in good conscience we cannot go forward.

This does not bode well for my town, Massachusetts or America.

The trouble with old people, part 47

A community, like Yarmouth, like Cape Cod in general, with a larger percentage of elderly residents than the statewide or nationwide average will suffer severe consequences. Especially if they live alone. The real tragedy isn’t that the elderly are terrible drivers famous for hitting the gas in front of hair salons or tattoo parlors and crashing through the front windows. It’s not the left hand turn signal that never goes out no matter which direction they are travelling. No, it is even more serious than that.

Old folks, and we have twice as many as the rest of the state as a percentage of our total population, eventually stop shopping and going out to eat. They get Meals on Wheels. The only workers they require are minimum wage home health aides and grass cutters. They require serious health care assistance and more drug stores per capita than casinos in Las Vegas. They stop making any contribution to the local economy. They start to drag it down.

And they vote, against everything. School funding can’t be improved, town infrastructure maintained, new projects, like sewers or mixed housing developments, can’t get started. After town meeting or voting they gather on the sidewalk bumping into each other’s walkers and wondering out loud where they are and commenting to each other about the high taxes keeping them from going to Foxwoods more than twice a month. They won’t sell their retirement homes and simply stop maintaining them instead. The grass grows up and the trim paint peels off. Property values in the neighborhood decline but they don’t care because they can’t see the messy pile they live in for what it really is.

That cheap wooden ramp up to the front door is always an attractive feature. The general thought today is that moving in with one of the children and perhaps the grandchildren would be a big negative for everybody.

And that may be true if you are as cranky, depressed and unpleasant to everyone as many of these folks are. That’s perhaps why no one comes to visit any more. It’s not just that “everyone is dead” as you like to say, it’s more that you have grown into an old asshole.

My grandmother Callery came to live with us when her husband died and we were little children. She cooked and cleaned, made pleasant conversation with the parents, watched the children and contributed to the family. Because she had worked before Social Security she had no income of her own. Now, I’m not suggesting making old people dependents of their families but I can’t help but think that many elderly would actually feel better and have a better outlook if they were part of an extended family on a regular basis.