Socialists, Hiding In the Closet

WHEN SOCIAL SECURITY was implemented in 1935, my mother was a fifteen year old high school student, a member of a conservative, Repbulican dairy farming family. She and my grandparents all had the exact same attitude about the new FDR program: it was a very bad idea, it simply was not going to work. Roosevelt's socialistic agenda was a huge mistake, they firmly believed, too much government ivolvement in people's lives. The government would immediately begin taking money out of every paycheck of every hard working American, for the rest of the person's working life....for what? Upon retirement the government would begin to pay the money back, in the form of a monthly payment from the Treasury Department. Full retirement age was determined to be sixty five, with early retirement, with lower Social Security payments, possible. There were several obvious problems with this. One, few people actually lived to "retire" in those days. It was conisdered normal for workers to work as long as they were able, then to live out their lives in the care of ther immediate families. That didn't leave much time for actual "retirement". Life expectancy was considerably lower in the nineteen thirties; most folks lived only a few short years beyond the end of their working lives. My mother and her parents were convinced that they would all spend the rest of their working lives paying into a system from which they would never, could not possibly ever get their money back. How wrong they were, as my mother acknowledged late in her long life. My grandfather did indeed die before he was able to retire and enjoy the benefits of social security. But my grandmother lived for several decades beyond her husband, and in fact remarried and outlived her second husband. The social security system did just fine by her. My mother, a career registered nurse, retired at sixty six and lived to ninety three, and drew social security for the twenty seven years of her long and active retirement. She enjoyed her much deserved retired years, remaining active in gardening, community activities, complaining that she never won at the weekly community bingo tournament, and enjoying watching her two children achieve success in early adulthood, all the way into their middle age. It seems likely to me that my mother received far more in social security payments than she ever paid into the system, although she paid into it for more than forty years as a career nurse. That's the way the system works; some people die before they can reap the benefits of their hard work, others live long and reap the benefits afforded by those who die early. By the time my mother died, she was a born again believer in social security, as well as medicare, and all those horrible socialistic programs she and her parents so opposed when they were instituted. I once asked her whether she voted for Roosevelt in 1944, when she was first eleigble to vote in a presidential election. She gave me two answers; "no", and "hell no". My mother turned out to be very lucky that the Democratic socialist president she and her fmaily so loved to hate won those elections in which they voted against him; had Republicnas been in office all along, social security would never have become more than a glimmer in the eyes of America's left wing. The same scenario happens over and over and over in American life; Republican conservatives complain about the dreaded horror of socialism, but do not heistate to take full advantage of its benefits. They send their children to public schools, drive on publicly owned streets and highways, receive protection from socialistic (publicly, not privately owned) police and fire departments and the military, and late in life join pulbicly owned socialized senior centers and gladly accept their social security checks. They are closet socialists, and, in all fairness, hypocrites.