America's choices: the Nazis or the Fukawis

During the time of covid-shutdown America, I stumbled across a voice howling (on Substack) from the Florida wilderness, which I felt was a good bit more tuned in than most of what I saw online. A recent sampling:

My Two Senses

What I'd Rather Be Doing
Ol’ Flawriduh Cracker

Mar 13, 2023

I spent most of my career in creating stuff and imagined that I would be spending most of my time doing stuff to amuse my nieces and nephews… Instead I am spending inordinate amounts of time alerting my fellow Americans to the coming wave of Christo-Fascist, Authoritarian, Oligarchy that continues to pretty much unabated to destroy our great experiment in a Democratic Republic.

BTW this thing pretty much began in the modern era with the Dulles Brothers (Nazi Lovers) and the once considered laughable John Birch Society whose dogma then is now that of the modern Republican Party. 

My next post will provide a “hi-light reel” of that arc in our history that we apparently just fail to see. 

Sloan Bashinsky

Sadly, you are correct. Alas, the Democrats have done and continue to do plenty to end the Republic, too. About all of which a buddy of mine and I also have tried our darnedest to try to wake up the dead, But then, I think in Gospels, Jesus told someone who wanted to attend a funeral, instead of following him (Jesus), "Let the dead bury the dead." But then, if we don't keep shooting off our mouths, blowing our wannabe trumpets, how will God view that? I think it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who said, "Silence in the face of Evil itself is Evil. God will not hold us guiltless." Maybe ETs will say enough is enough! And invade to save the planet from Earthlings😎.

Ol’ Flawriduh Cracker

Sloan, we need clear leadership that is willing to call Republicans Fascists and to rally the 50% of Democrats in my state that do not vote. If they did this state would no longer be in the grip of Republicans.

Instead, they seem to believe that denial of what the Republican agenda is or that it is bluster is the only defense.

When we are reduced to waiting for miracles to intercede, then we are in real trouble.

Thanks for your comments as always

Sloan Bashinsky   

I have been less kind to the Republican side. I have likened them to Nazis. Look at any Trump rally. Seas of white faces. In the law is the doctrine, res ipsa loquitur, Latin for, the thing speaks for itself. Res ipsa is evidentiary, admissible as evidence, determinative proof. 

The American right ignore what Ivana revealed about Donald. When they were married, he kept a book of Hitler's speeches in a cabinet on his side of their bed, and sometimes at night he pulled out that book and read it. It boggles my mind that any woman, or black, or brown, or yellow, or red American, votes for Trump.

The Democrats, of whom I am not either, remind me of the famous in some circles Fukawi tribe, who are always getting lost and gathering in a circle and sitting down and chanting, "Where in the fuck are we? Where in the fuck are we?" 

If half the Democrats in Florida do not vote, perhaps only God and ETs are all that's left to hope for? 

As if someone elsewhere was reading over my shoulder: 

Yahoo Finance
White House demands Pence apologize for 'homophobic joke' aimed at Buttigieg 

LIBBY CATHEY
Mon, March 13, 2023

The White House on Monday asked former Vice President Mike Pence to apologize for what it called a "homophobic joke" he made over the weekend geared at Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

"The former vice president's homophobic joke about Secretary Buttigieg was offensive and inappropriate, all the more so because he treated women suffering from postpartum depression as a punchline," White House press secretary Karine-Jean Pierre said in a statement. "He should apologize to women and LGBTQ people, who are entitled to be treated with dignity and respect."

Pence, headlining at the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington for journalists and politicians, mocked Buttigieg for taking parental leave after the birth of his adopted twins while he said Americans faced issues with air travel.

"He took two months 'maternity' leave whereupon thousands of travelers were stranded in airports, the air traffic system shut down, and airplanes nearly collided on our runways. Pete is the only person in human history to have a child and everyone else gets postpartum depression," Pence said, according to reporters present.

Notably, Buttigieg's twins were born prematurely, developed Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection (RSV) and one was hospitalized and put on a ventilator, a point his husband, Chasten, called out in a tweet directed at the rumored 2024 presidential hopeful.

"An honest question for you, @Mike_Pence, after your attempted joke this weekend. If your grandchild was born prematurely and placed on a ventilator at two months old - their tiny fingers wrapped around yours as the monitors beep in the background - where would you be?" he said.

Donna

Pence is as bad as Trump.  If he thinks he is funny he isn't.  He is another republican disgrace.  Don't Run Pence.  You won't get votes because the Trump lovers are going to hold it against you that you wouldn't throw the election.  Only smart thing you have done in years.

Sloan Bashinsky

Pence impressed me on Jan 6, by standing firm, and later, by saying Trump put him and his family at risk. Pence then waffled, didn't seem interested in Trump being prosecuted for trying to overthrow the national government. If Pence is so "pro-life", why isn't he frothing at the mouth ongoing for Trump being prosecuted? 

What this Independent cannot accept is the 2 months leave Pete took from a cabinet position. I think he should resign. I think he has cost the Democrats votes in 2024. 

My personal history is, I fathered three children by the same woman. She was wasted after each birth. I got up in the middle of the night to bring her our new baby to nurse. I changed the baby's diapers and washed them out in the toilet, and went back to bed and to sleep. 

After our first child died at 7 weeks of sudden infant death syndrome, we were devastated. I could barely move. I was in law school. I took one day off from classes and then returned to class. It was horrible. Yet, I had to keep moving. 

So, I can sympathize with Pete and his spouse in that way. And in another way. I have a granddaughter who felt like she was male and had surgery to become male. I view religious freaks like Pence as terrorists. 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

failure is essential to living and being

I spent most of my life failing at what I took on. I kept trying, though. 

Early this year, I joined an online group, which seemed to have considerably more substance than what I was seeing at Facebook and Reddit.

Poetic Outlaws

Exegesis of Failure

By: Emil Cioran

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude. For each of us will do anything in order not to be doomed to himself.

Our kind is not a fatality but the temptation to fail. Incapable of keeping our hands clean and our hearts undiluted, we soil ourselves upon contact with strange sweats, we wallow—craving for disgust and fervent for pestilence—in the unanimous mud. And when we dream of seas changed into holy water, it is too late to dive into them, and our advanced state of corruption keeps us from drowning there: the world has infested our solitude; upon us the traces of others become indelible.

In the gamut of creatures, only man inspires a sustained disgust. The repugnance which an animal begets is provisional; it never ripens in thought, whereas our kind obsesses our reflections, infiltrates the mechanism of our detachment from the world in order to confirm us in our system of refusal and non-adherence.

After each conversation, whose refinement alone is enough to indicate the level of a civilization, why is it impossible not to regret the Sahara and not to envy the plants or the endless monologues of zoology? If with each word we win a victory over nothingness, it is only the better to endure its reign.

We die in proportion to the words which we fling around us . . . Those who speak have no secrets. And we all speak. We betray ourselves, we exhibit our heart; executioner of the unspeakable, each of us labors to destroy all the mysteries, beginning with our own.

And if we meet others, it is to degrade ourselves together in a race to the void, whether in the exchange of ideas, schemes, or confessions. Curiosity has provoked not only the first fall but the countless ones of every day of our lives. Life is only that impatience to fall, to fail, to prostitute the soul’s virginal solitudes by dialogue, ageless and everyday negation of Paradise.

Man should listen only to himself in the endless ecstasy of the intransmissible Word, should create words for his own silences and assents audible only to his regrets. But he is the chatterbox of the universe; he speaks in the name of others; his self loves the plural. And anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

Politicians, reformers, and all who rely on a collective pretext are cheats. There is only the artist whose lie is not a total one, for he invents only himself. Outside of the surrender to the incommunicable, the suspension amid our mute and unconsoled anxieties, life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

The implicit plural of “one” and the avowed plural of “we” constitute the comfortable refuge of false existence. Only the poet takes responsibility for “I,” he alone speaks in his own name, he alone is entitled to do so.

Poetry is bastardized when it becomes permeable to prophecy or to doctrine: “mission” smothers music, idea shackles inspiration. Shelly’s “generous” aspect cripples most of his work; Shakespeare, by a stroke of luck, never “served” anything.

The victory of non-authenticity is fulfilled in philosophical activity, that complacence in “one,” and in prophetic activity [whether religious, moral, or political], that apotheosis of “we.”

Definition is the lie of the abstract mind; inspired formula the lie of the militant one; a definition is always the cornerstone of a temple; a formula inescapably musters the faithful. Thus all teachings begin. How then fail to turn to poetry? It has, like life, the excuse of proving nothing.)

Thinking Cioran was quite the chatterbox himself, I volunteered some of my own chatter.

Sloan Bashinsky

How about?

spiritual bipolar disorder,

the cause of all

human ails,

including wars,

if the demons aren't counted

spiritual bi polar disorder,

the destruction of the

south pole,

the feminine,

the north pole,

he ain't been

right in the head

since she's been gone

Sloan Bashinsky

I can't find anything about Cioran being poet. I did find more stuff about him assessing poets.

Poetic Outlaws Author

He wasn't a poet. He was a philosopher who wrote poetically. 

 

Sloan Bashinsky

I gather he wasn’t a mystic, either. Yet, he seemed in what you posted here to hold forth on both topics, as if he was an expert or blessed with all-knowing, yet how could that be, if he was not a poet nor a mystic, asks a poet and a mystic?

Poetic Outlaws Author

I think his wisdom came from beyond even the mystics and the poets. He was brilliant. 

Sloan Bashinsky

I’ve known lots of brilliant people, far smarter than me, who had no clue, were not able to grasp, nor appreciate, nor even believe I wasn’t making up what little I told them of what I had experienced that was not of this world, and they were just as tone death to small amounts of reams of poetry that had leaped out of me. Had similar experience with quite a few poets, yet not with all the poets I crossed paths with.

Back in my own "time zone"...

In early 1987, out of bright ideas, at the end of my rope, feeling I had failed in every way a man could fail, I made a desperate prayer:

"Dear God, I do not want do die like this, failed. Please help me." I paused, then added, "I offer my life to human service." 

Something fluttered inside of me, tears came into my eyes. It passed. I went on about my day.

About ten days later, I awoke in the wee hours, saw two spirit beings shaped like white shifts hovering above me in the darkness. I heard, not with my ears, but quite clearly:

"This will push you to your limits, but you asked for it and we are going to give it to you." 

I saw a white flash and my body and psyche was jolted by something electrical. That happened two more times. The two beings faded out. I was physically shaking and sweating. 

Slowly but inexorably, I was turned every upside down, inside out, and every which a way but loose. I was stood before many mirrors. My perspective of everything, including myself, changed, and kept changing, as the process continued.

In April 2001, when I again felt like total, abject failure, a poem fell out of me as fast as I could type it.

The World's Greatest Failure

I know what it is to love fully,

have my heart broken by death

and by loved ones' rejections,

Over and over again,

so I can love even more.

I know what it is to be engulfed in pain,

Awash in evil,

Terrified, enraged, despaired,

Believing God has again forsaken me,

Then be given the truth

that again makes me free.

I know what it is to doubt,

Be lost and wandering

time and time again,

Then be rescued yet again

and my faith grows deeper.

I know what it is to blindly trust,

Then be destroyed by betrayal

time and time again,

Until I trust only God.

I know what it is to have much

and be completely of this world,

Then have it all taken away

and be in the world but not of it.

I know what it is to fail in this world,

and fail and fail and fail:

The world's greatest failure,

I can serve only God.

I know what it is to give

and give and give and give;

I cannot stop giving

because giving is receiving.

I know what it is to explain God

time after time after time again.

Something demands I keep explaining:

Maybe someone will listen,

Maybe me.

The irony of having prayed in early 1987, for God to deliver me from my own failure, did not escape me. 

Yet, what is failure, really? 

Who, or what, decides?

I read online the other day, that nobody achieves anything, who does not fail many times. Failing is essential to living and being.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

 

Art gives us the illusion of liberation from the sordid business of living?

From a Facebook group I joined in early 2023:

Poetic Outlaws 

Art gives us the illusion 
of liberation from the 
sordid business 
of being.

~ Fernando Pessoa 

Sloan Bashinsky 

And here I thought art, in its various forms, is the soul's expression of that sordid and sometimes beautiful business.

I can only speak for myself: that when my Muse flows, I feel a lot more alive and whole, and sometimes I see her handiwork playing out in my life. 

Poetic Outlaws 

The great Charles Bukowski died on this day in 1994: 

“There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.”

Sloan Bahsinsky

All hail irreverence! The truth will set us free, but first it will piss us off! Ka-pow!

But then, when my 7 weeks-old son died of sudden infant death syndrome my senior year in law school, my heart was ripped out of my chest and shredded by a bush hog for a very long time. It was a long time before I appreciated his death had so unhinged me, that no matter how hard I tired, I was unable to fit myself into the programs and dreams my family, their religion, my friends, women I loved, society and I had for me. And one day a poem came out of me that perhaps he had something to do with. Actually, there were lots of poems he perhaps had something to do with, but this was the first:

Living Poets

Dead poets are poets who never write

Who obey shoulds and oughts

Who live to please others

Who value money over God

Who die without ever having lived

Death is their mark 

 

Dead poets are remembered by the living.

Living poets are remembered by time

Dead poets never sing their song

Living poets nover stop singing it

The difference between the two is this:

One worships fear, the other life

To be a dead poet is hard

It requires being someone else

To be a living poet is easy

It only means being myself

One choice is hell, the other heaven

That is what is meant by free will

 

The next poem that came:  

I happened upon a mockingbird

singing his fool head off.

I asked him how and why he sang?

But all he did was look ahead,

all he did was sing.

He never turned to see if I was watching,

Or listened for money jingling in my pockets,

Or asked if I liked his music,

Or expected a recording contract.

He was too busy singing

to pay any attention to me.

Thus did I learn

the greatest sin of all

is to kill a mockingbird.  

 

And another:

Who invented the rule that poetry must rhyme, have pentameter, be cast into verse? Yes, please tell me, who, just who, invented that really silly rule? Surely it wasn't the maker of the first stone - otherwise, there'd be no stones to break all those slavin' rules!  

And another:

He feels deep beauty in the dark pool from which his writings flow. She clings to him like fine silk, precious oil. She feels solid, compressed, like … a black pearl, growing from inside out, ever larger with each stroke of his pen, pushing her precious waters over her banks into his dreams and life...  

And another:

Earth...

The sacred prism

through which souls are refracted

into their elemental parts,

purified in Holy Fire,

then one-forged

and sent on their way

to not even God knows where,

simply because they are all

unique emanations of God,

evolving ...

Here's a link to HEAVY WAIT: A Strange Tale, which fell out of me during April, May and June 2000. The storyline was provided by.a Key West street performer, whose jaw dropped when I told him I'd lived half the plot the year prior. This often stranger than fiction novel is a free read, with no ads, at internet library archives. It demonstrates/manifests all of the poems above.

https://archive.org/details/heavy-wait-a-strange-tale_202212/mode/2up

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

perhaps keelhauling is the best medicine for prevaricating politicians and the invasive species

keelhauling

This below was posted at Facebook by a Key West radio talk show host and musician, who bills himself as "Soundman From Hell."

Gary

Politics in America:

"Republicans lie, and the Democrats leave out key parts of the truth."

- Chris Rock

Guy

We need to get rid of both parties no Democrats no Republicans it's just another form of prejudice in order to not get anything done

Gary

Guy I agree

Sloan Bashinsky

Guy political parties are secular religions, cults; some claim they represent God; good luck getting rid of them. I ran 10 times for local public office in so-called paradise, as the “independent” candidate. My position on every issue was against the grain, out of the box. Perhaps an alien invasion to capture the planet and enslave humanity would bring humanity together? Into sync? When pigs fly? 

Gary

Sloan Bashinsky yeah it's a lot like picking up sports team for the super bowl or whatever they call it.

Sloan Bashinsky

Gary  I dunno, Soundman. I don't see picking and rooting for a pro football winner take all game compares to voting for candidates for public office. I never saw a pro football championship game damage America. I saw local elected officials in "paradise" give it away to real estate developers. I saw them put in $$$ we trust into their pledge of allegiance. I saw them vote against Mother Nature repeatedly, and for property rights incessantly. I saw the ocean around the Florida Keys become polluted. I saw 90 percent of the coral reef die. I saw it become unsafe to swim in the ocean, because it was full of MRSA flesh-eating bacteria. I saw polluted waters signs/flags at public beaches. I watched sea-killing cruise ships become more necessary to Key West's economy than all its water sports combined. I saw the voters keep electing candidates who went along with all of that. Become of its ethnic, racial and gender diversity, Key West was a proxy for all of America. I really do think it will take an alien invasion, or a giant meteor strike like the meteor that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, to save the planet from the invasive species - humanity.

Guy

Sloan Bashinsky yeah I understand it will never happen just like when did Jehovah witness come by and say everyone will get together and be happy there's no way so long as we're human beings and have love hate lust all the things that make us up there will always be strife

Sloan Bashinsky

Guy No Jehovah witness ever came by and told me everyone will get together and we all will be happy. I took to telling them sometimes that I was Jewish, or Mormon, and they thanked me and left. Other times, I told them if they lived in my skin, they might wish there was no Jehovah . Sometimes I gave them examples of my personal experiences with angels mentioned in the Bible. Nothing seemed to sink into their minds. But then, if a Martian stood before them, would they know it was a Martian, even if its skin color was green? Would they even be able to see the Martian, even though it was in plain view? 

Guy 

Sloan Bashinsky we are the Martian Invaders of this beautiful planet

Sloan Bashinsky

Guy I dunno, perhaps taking that view insults Martians? Perhaps we are Klingons? 

Guy

Sloan Bashinsky we are something that we are not native

Sloan Bashinsky

Guy  If we humans were native to this planet we call Earth, wouldn't we be slightly more inclined to take care of our home? Under the law, we have the legal right to use lethal force against people who break into our homes. I keep wondering when Earth will use lethal force to defend herself from humans? 

 

During my 18-year stint living in so-called paradise, there was much talk about doing something about invasive species, such as iguanas, which the real invasive species, humans, had introduced into the Florida Keys. I kept saying, humans are the invasive species in the Florida Keys. They brought the iguanas into the Keys. They destroyed the Keys. Perhaps a mother of all hurricanes will restore the Keys to what they were like before the white people came there. That line wasn't a great vote getter. 

 

Nor was it, when I was asked at a county commission candidate forum in 2006: What did I think about bringing Mosquito Control back into the county government versus Mosquito Control continuing as an independent government authority? I said I would get rid of Mosquito Control, because the sprays it used were more dangerous than the mosquitoes. I wish I also had thought to say, the mosquitoes are Mother Nature's natural defense against the invasive species, humans. 

 

This editorial cartoon was in the Key West Citizen in 2008, when I was running for county commission and was asked at a county commission candidate forum: What did I think were the three greatest threats to the Florida Keys? I said, "The Gang of Three." The three notorious sitting county commissioners, who had been bought and paid for by real estate developers and their lawyers.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Would you wear my eyes?

At Poetic Outlaws:

Would You Wear My Eyes?

By: Erik Rittenberry

Every time I open my big mouth

I put my soul in it.

It takes so much to be nothing,

to shroud the mind’s eye

from the gaudy theater

of the head.

Hey subscribers, it’s Friday and I feel like sharing a poem with you all from one of my all-time favorite Beat Poets — the great Bob Kaufman.

Kaufman was an American poet, a street poet, a jazz poet, “a poet of the people.” He wasn’t mainstream and unfortunately (or fortunately) he never captured worldwide notoriety like his contemporaries Ginsburg, Kerouac, Burroughs, and Gary Snyder.

He was a poet who preferred the hidden shadows of the city over the seduction of fame and fortune.

Kaufman grew up in New Orleans reading Henry James, Proust, Melville, Flaubert, and many others. At 18, he became a laborer and then joined the Merchant Marine. It was at this time during the Eisenhower years that the Beat literary movement slithered out of the arid American soil of conventionality and monotony.

The Beat poets were young spiritual renegades on a quest for the deeper meaning of it all. Their hyperbolic writings and wild antics sparked that infamous movement of what sociologists labeled “the counter-culture”— that youthful explosion of art, music, sex, psychedelics, and rebellion.

These poets and writers were in defiance against, in the words of Kerouac, “the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time…”

There they were — Walt Whitman’s illegitimate children, poetic bohemians, metaphysical dissidents, ramblin’ around the country in complete defiance of the banal, television-watchin’, materialistic charade of a lifestyle that was sweeping across the nation.

It was around this time that Kaufman headed to San Fran where he met the king of the Beats himself, Jack Kerouac. Shortly after the encounter, Kaufman reinvented himself as a poet, spiritually and in the flesh. He refused to work pointless jobs and accepted the inevitable poverty and hardships that came with pursuing the arts.

He once wrote: “I want to be anonymous. I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvment, but I don’t want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.”

Poetry was it for him, his “golden eternity,” and he would do it with nothing to fall back on. He was arrested numerous times, locked up and beaten, and then spit back onto the cold streets of the city. And he still wrote. Relentlessly.

During the times that he wasn’t in jail, you might find Kaufman on any given day standing on the tables in some hipster café or on some midnight corner under a lamplight reciting his own poetry for any and everyone to hear.

Bob Kaufman was a voyager, a madman with a moonburnt soul, a “wanderer of the heart, wanderer of star worlds, off to a million tomorrows.” As he once wrote:

When I die,

I won’t stay

Dead.

I hope you enjoy this poem as much as I do. You can find it in the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman

Would You Wear My Eyes?

My body is a torn mattress,

Disheveled throbbing place

For the comings and goings

Of loveless transients.

The whole of me

Is an unfurnished room

Filled with dank breath

Escaping in gasps to nowhere.

Before completely objective mirrors

I have shot myself with my eyes,

But death refused my advances.

I have walked on my walls each night

Through strange landscapes in my head.

I have brushed my teeth with orange peel,

Iced with cold blood from the dripping faucets.

My face is covered with maps of dead nations;

My hair is littered with drying ragweed.

Bitter raisins drip haphazardly from my nostrils

While schools of glowing minnows swim from my mouth.

The nipples of my breasts are sun-browned cockleburrs;

Long-forgotten Indian tribes fight battles on my chest

Unaware of the sunken ships rotting in my stomach.

My legs are charred remains of burned cypress trees;

My feet are covered with moss from bayous, flowing

across my floor.

I can’t go out anymore.

I shall sit on my ceiling.

Would you wear my eyes?

Sloan Bashinsky

Although it wasn't much fun, and it was because I ran out of money, I lived on and off the street for several years, and during that time I sometimes slept in a tent or vehicle, but mostly it was on the ground and sometimes in the front lobby of a police station. Sometimes I stayed nights in homeless shelters, sometimes I stayed in the homes of friends. Sometimes I was accused of being homeless on purpose, or I was researching a book. I never wanted to disappear and never be heard, and often I was quite noisy via things I wrote, first by email, then a blog, and things I said at city and county government meetings and in churches. I was always out of the box; I claimed much of what I said or wrote was inspired by angels known in the Bible, who had and still were turning me every which a way but loose and upside down and inside out. Some really jolting to me poetry leaped out of me during that time, but most of the poetry had come earlier and some came later, when I was living inside. I think the core of actually living is, we engage what comes our way, the best we can, and sometimes we simply let it pass by or through us, and we keep on going, like stranger than fiction, or strangers in a strange land, which was a really important novel by Robert Heinlein.

Meanwhile, at Facebook:

Jim

Why do news idiots keep calling SSI and Medicare entitlements.....

Laura

So they can convince you that your $$ is actually their$$..

Sloan Bashinsky

Laura because we are entitled to get what we bought?

Laura

Sloan Bashinsky no!!according to the government..you didn't "buy" anything..it's an allotment being bestowed upon you at their discretion..so we should all be grateful..

Sloan Bashinsky

Laura Nobody from the government ever told me that. In fact, I did pay for it with US dollars. From all I hear around and see online and on TV, it's the Republicans that want to take away what I bought. So, my suggestion to them is, o, my suggestion to them is, they take it away from Republicans, MAGAs, Libertarians and anyone else who is on Social Security who wants to take away what I bought.

Am now reminded of back when Alabama's hospitals were full of Covid-19 patients, who had declined to be vaccinated, people with serious medical problems, such as heart attack, stroke, could not. get into those hospitals. When President Trump came to Alabama during that time and urged his followers in Cullman, Alabama to get vaccinated, they booted him. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, a very conservative Republican, finally broke ranks and urged the unvaccinated people in Alabama to get vaccinated. I took up saying posting online that people who declined to get vaccinated and hen caught Covid-19 should not be allowed into hospitals that receive federal funding. I was accused of wanting people to die. I replied that it was people who didn't get vaccinated that wanted to die, and so let them die and leave hospitals for people who want to live.

Laura

Sloan Bashinsky yeah, I get angry when government talks about my social security being an "entitlement". That's my money! I think if I choose I should be able to get a lump sum and any interest accumulated. My heirs should be entitled to it upon my death.Instead it's now become the largest "tax" ever levied on us. Guess they need to get the $$ from somewhere to redistribute.

Sloan Bashinsky

Laura I never looked at my Social Security as an asset that passed on to my heirs. I viewed it as something to help me get by financially (the monthly payments) and medically (Medicare and Medicaid. If I had a wife, then she should get it after I croaked. But I don't have a wife, so it ends when I die, if the right side of the American political-religious spectrum don't take it away sooner. Some of them want to abolish the IRS and the federal income tax, and leave taxation to the states. Imagine what would happen church coffers, if the federal income tax deduction for gifts to churches was eliminated. 

 

W/hen I was in Costa Rica in 2000, I needed medical attention and it was provided for free. When I told that to people when I was back in America, they went off on some kind of rant against socialism, or they had something to say against free medical treatment. I told them the reason Costa Rica could do that was it didn't have a huge national military to pay for. The last time the American military perhaps defended me was when I was a tot during World War II.

Laura

Sloan Bashinsky Lyndon Johnson used it as a trove of untapped resources..saw a huge amount of our $$ ready to be spent (redistributed). I would be better served if I had been able to keep that huge chunk every paycheck. How about the many who have no dependents and die before receiving any SSI "benefits"? Who gets that $$?...uncle sam..

Sloan Bashinsky

Laura Yes, after last replying to you, I realized I had not included our dependents, especially minor children. 

 

I didn't know about President Johnson, perhaps he inspired today's Republicans to follow suit?

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com