Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Portrait of an Activist


The old man is blessed with a number of fascinating relatives. One of them is a niece called Linda. In recent years I have dubbed her The Activist. She is a mid-generation Baby Boomer born about a quarter century after the old man.
Unfortunately Linda inherited a certain determined and very private individualism and a congenital heart condition from the old man’s family. Much more fortunately she got her talent, intellect and positive personality from her father!
Linda’s mother and the old man, who was the baby of his generation, had an always loving but often disapproving-of-each-other sibling relationship. Partly that was because of their age difference. In spite of that the old man eventually gained some maturity as did the relationship, which soon included Linda’s father, the old man’s wife and then Linda herself. Linda’s father brought a new, different and rather exciting dimension to the old man and his whole family.
That persisted for some four short years until the old man decided to leave the coastal environment to begin his own struggle for upward mobility. They lost touch except for occasional visits, even after the old man decided to return to the gentle valley of his childhood in the frustrating pursuit of impossible dreams beyond his capacity. He found his older sibling still beautiful but with only a shadow of her vibrancy. Linda suddenly lost her mother to heart disease when she was just eight.
While the old man became ever more absorbed in his personal, family, professional and community struggles, Linda grew up under her father’s guidance, developed many friendships and a new generational sophistication. We saw her periodically in family group settings and while visiting her father but learned little of her complexity and achievements until the old man’s later retirement. In the meantime she had taken voice training at the university, travelled Europe by car with a friend of many years, took teacher’s training and taught school for many years. Linda had a special bent for taking up causes, certain she would make a difference and make the world a better place. Somewhere along the line, though, she was diagnosed with the heart disease that seems to affect many of the females in the old man’s family. She suffered through a number of surgeries, developed a super-sensitivity to electro-magnetic radiation and after years of disability finally accepted early retirement from the teaching profession.
For a number of years now Linda has made the anti-wireless, anti-WiFi and more recently the anti-Smart Meter causes [Linda is the one with the glasses shown in the photo above] into completely absorbing, totally demanding causes while the old man cautioned her to take it easy in what seems a losing cause in our time. Ever ready to help others, including the old man with his aging problems, Linda has not slowed down.
In early February the old man, along with many others, got e-mail notice that Linda, who lives alone, had been roused by friends sufficiently to admit them and get her to hospital. Her childhood friend of so many years was kind enough to call the old man later the next day to provide a few details.
Since then the old man has heard that after a few days of observation, Linda has returned to her home under the care of her friends and according to visitors who saw Linda during her hospital stay, Linda is her bright and cheerful self.
Through all this trauma and clan gathering, the old man has been his usual contrarian self. He has made no effort to visit, sent no flowers or get-well cards, totally intent on giving her time to heal, stay as quiet as possible, and get a clean bill of health. Then, lo and behold, a mass mailing e-mail arrived from Linda in the old man’s Inbox this morning urging him to sign another community’s anti-Smart Meter petition on behalf of Citizens for Safe Technology. Linda seems to be back at work!
Though the old man and his spouse of nearly 63 years have not told her so privately, they wish to tell her in this sometimes public way that they both love her dearly and that she is proving once again that she truly is Linda the Activist with a capital “A”. No matter where they are positioned in her personal universe or whether they agree with her personal decisions or not, for them Linda will always be on the side of the angels!
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Thursday, February 2, 2012

Aging Security


In his dim and distant politically active past the old man has variously supported the Conservatives (of whatever name) and the Liberals. In Canada that has really meant a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum, as our Socialists (of various names) have charged. In our parliamentary system my reason for the variety had more to do with what I considered necessary periodic changes in the ruling dictatorships than any real hope of changing the national trends and goals in our country’s practice of the art of the possible.
     Since the advent of the first of our species during and after the glacial periods, the developing body politic of this continent, including the part that became Canada, has been fractured. The arrival of the French, the English, the Scots and the Irish, not to mention the earlier Iberians and later Africans and Asians, encouraged more tribalism and division. Electoral policies since World War 2 have catered to that division in Canada's large national area to make it even more ungovernable that it was in the century before.
The old man has been known to rail against multiculturalism, against the codification of “rights and freedoms”, against multiple citizenship possibilities, against capital punishment, and against many of the equalizing policies that have created so many dependencies in Canada, Europe and even in the United States to the point that they exceed government ability to collect and pay their costs. The most nonsensical part of these policies is the universality aspect of them.
     In this piece the old man’s contrariness again rears its head because of the furor caused by Prime Minister Harper’s casual comments at the Davos economic forum in Switzerland that his government would have to take steps to change our pension system. I assume he did that deliberately from the European context to get the furor started at home early in his new majority mandate. If one listens to the talking heads on television and reports from pension recipients and the parliamentary opposition, it is apparent that Harper is now exercising his Machiavellian secret agenda to eviscerate the “poor” for the benefit of his banking and oil company friends. God knows what other secrets may be found out before he completes his four year majority.Perhaps even some of his back benchers are worried lest their overly-generous pensions after retirement or defeat should be tampered with?
     I say such an overhaul is long overdue! Take the Old Age Security Pension, which is sufficient to express my contrariness here. First let me confess in retrospect that throughout my working years I expected that by the time I retired all the contributions I made to the welfare programs in taxes and assessments would be exhausted by payments to those already retired, and no pensions would be available for me. However, when I did retire at nearly age 57 for health reasons, I took into account the various programs then still available including Old Age Security at age 65 for  both my wife (25 days younger than I am) and me. The monthly CPI indexed cheques have been hitting our bank account for 20 years since then!
     Now I know the government did not force me to apply for OAS when I reached 65, but at the time we felt sufficiently insecure to apply. And how many who are already millionaires at 65 do you know who fail to do so? It is also true that our stay-at-home life style and depression born frugality has stayed with us. We could manage for the rest of our limited presence here without that pension. Perhaps we could terminate the entitlement before we die but when we consider the consequences of opening that particular can of worms, we decide to leave it closed.
     There is absolutely no reason why the already wealthy should be entitled to the extra windfall. Though it may never be politically possible and will not be in Harper’s time, the old man has always believed such payments should be means tested, not universally awarded.
     Furthermore, extending the eligibility date from age 65 to age 67 is simply a matter of keeping up with the times. Life expectancy has increased more than 2 years since the age 65 retirement date was set. Most healthy individuals at age 65 would actually prefer to keep on working as long as they can and many do so even after applying for the pension entitlement. Others strike out in new and perhaps even more strenuous undertakings and sometimes start new businesses. Most of us would prefer to continue with an expertise in regular work environments and routines. There is no reason why we should not continue to contribute for two more years to make the funds available more viable for pensioners getting in line at 67.
     It is a fact that the universality principle has already been tampered with by establishing Old Age Security Supplements and other adjustments for the poor and some manner of clawing back the taxable OAS from the wealthy, though I have not looked into the status of that in current tax law. Why not simply use the tax returns to index the amount of the pension cheque at both ends of the spectrum, sending a larger amount to those below a certain proven income and sending none at all to those above a maximum proven income? Surely some computer whiz civil servant could design a program to simplify the tax form and accomplish that result.

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I'm getting on in years, which is why this blog is called The Old Man's Post.