Overstaying

MY SISTER did everything the right way, the smart way. Good grades, college, career, military, civil service, comfortable retirement, steady marriage, no kids. Hell, she started out as a volunteer enlistee in an army band, piccolo plyer, and worked her way up to G-12 or something, and became THE personell manager at the Pentagon. Of the twenty seven thousand people who work at the Pentagon, if you didn't wear a military uniform, and most don't, if you were involved with support systems and servies for the military, food, cleaning, and all that, my sister hired you. She had good stories, stories about sharing a jacussi with high ranking generals while sipping margaritas, stuff like that. She retired at fifty five, is now seventy three, is still getting paid, and will be until she dies. One of her stories involves seeing Strom Thurmond walking along a sidewalk somewhere near the Pentagon. At the time he was nearly one hundred years old, had been in Congress for more than half a century, still was, and, as she described him, looked as if he belonged in a "home" somehwere, rather than tottering into the Senate Chamber and sitting behind his little antique wooden desk and harming America.That is precisely where we are now with Mitch McConnell. I googled him this morning, before coffee, and asked: "Is Mitch McConnnell still alive"? (Yes, I really wanted to know.) My sweetheart Alicia assured me that indeed he is, but not in good condition. The news on NPR had been a bit vague about it, going over his life as if he had died during the night, but not actually coming out an announcing it. I am seventy one years old, and have been retired from teaching, high school and college, since I turned sixty. In fact, I retired on the day I turned sixty. I had no desire to hang around and take a job away from an up and coming kid. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe we should all work until we drop, to avoid being a drag on our descendants. Either we keep working, and keep a job that a younger person needs, or, we retire, and live off the government and the younger generation, even though our Social Security money is ours, for, by God, we paid into it. Most of us take more out than we put in, by the way. Some people die too young, some live too long. It tends to balance out, financially. When my mother was sixteen and they started Social Security in 1935, she swore that whe would pay into it all her nursing carrer, and never get it back. She was wrong. She lived to ninety three, and got back far more than she ever paid in, as I have mentioned many times in my essays. Well, good for her. If we retire too young we become free loaders, if we work too long we steal a job from the next generation. To wit, we're screwed, no matter what. We strut and fret for a few decades, then die. The perfect scenario would be one in which we grow up, work at a job we love and contribute to society, then retire, and have perhaps a couple of decades of fun in the sun, as our reward. Some people hate work, some people hate retirement. As in most matters involving human beings, the key, it seems to me, is balance. Balance between work and leisure. People who love too much of one or the other need to recalibrate, and gain a balanced perspective. Mitch McConnell is way unbalanced, pathologically unbalanced. He should have turned over his seat in the Senate long ago, should gave given the next generation the chance to to govern themselves, rather than being governed, as Jefferson said, by their ancestors. I hope he realizes that now, if he is still capable of realizing anything.