The thread below is really getting good, and it's vanishing off the board. I routinely check older pages, but I don't think many other people do.

Re: "and the bennies are in whose name?"

I'm not sure where to start, and I'm not that eloquent. I understood, from my less-than-reliable memory, that you had children. I do not understand how you arrived at this unhappy world outlook about women. If you had not said you worked in a library, I would have guessed you were a volunteer at a battered women's home, or had some unhappy personal background (which is nobody's business but your own.) You have already written much about your personal life, but I saw nothing that would lead you to be so bitter. I judge you to be in general an optimistic personality, and wish you could lift yourself up out of this negative paradigm.

A CEO of an electronics company can retire in comfort, can afford medical care, can count on having a place to live. A CEO has an income derived from the investments purchased during a lifetime of working for an income.



Can a stay-at-home mother ever say as much?



Yeah, if she married the CEO. Sorry. Kind of a cheap shot. But why are you assuming the stay-at-home mother is, of course, on her own, without a husband, or at least friends, to help support her? Of course there are unskilled mothers who have to raise children on their own, but why assume that this is a "norm" rather than an exception? And it doesn't address those feminists who strongly encourage single motherhood and discourage marriage.

If something happened to me, I have a fat life insurance policy and my wife and kids would get our house and all other property*. Even if my wife did not have her own profession, she would hardly be tossed out in the street. The money in my retirement account would be hers. Of course my accumulated Social Security benefits, except for whatever pittance she might get as a widow, evaporate, a big factor in the privatization issue.

...Our way of life treats stay-at-home parents (who happen to be primarily mothers) as if they do nothing, as if they produce nothing. They get a card on Mother's (or Father's) Day. Children are not obligated to support them in their old age, and they are considered "unemployed", and so receive nothing for all their years of hard work except the satisfaction of a job well done. That and 75 cents will get you a cup of coffee. If they have no income because they "haven't worked", or have a reduced retirement because they "haven't worked" enough, well, that's OK. Gratitude is lovely, if you get it, but you can't eat it and it doesn't buy insulin or blood pressure medicine.



I'm glad you think of your mom. Social Security and Medicare will still be around for the GI generation because they will bludgeon both parties with their political power.



"Our way of life?" Who are you talking about? Do you really believe that most parents in this country are abandoned by ungrateful children to die in poverty? You seem to automatically assume that if it weren't for Social Security, my parents would starve. You talk about children not being "obligated" to support their parents. Where did they learn this? It's not what I was taught. Does that "me first" attitude toward family sound like a liberal value, or a conservative value?

My parents have three kids and an extended family who would break their backs to see that they are taken care of, including medicine, the same way that my parents took care of my grandparents. Isn't that the way it's supposed to work? Admit it...isn't that the way it usually works?

The man who's working his ass off to support his kids still has a pension at the end of the day, doesn't he? What about her?

The only pension I have is what I put in the bank. I'm self-employed. A pension is a luxury nowadays, mostly for executives and union laborers. And my money is my wife's money.

My litany of pain is what I see around me, thank you very much. These are people I know. Well, not the concubines.

Again, I'm not sure where you live that you are surrounded by so much pain (not to mention fundamentalist looneys). You see all this in a library? Is your library in a ghetto? Are none of your friends happily married? Or grandparents? I don't know enough facts to make a judgement, but maybe like many liberals pain is just what you have been trained to notice.

Now for a short political message (skip this if you want):

Pain is the life blood of the leftist politician, because that is what buys him political power. A person who needs nothing from the government is useless to the politician, and because that person is often also the productive person the politician is sucking wealth from to gain power, may be not only useless to the politician but an active enemy.

Why do you think you are flooded by the media with news of the homeless, the starving, the poor, the abused? Why do you think the image of the well-adjusted nuclear family is spat on as a sick Norman Rockwell fantasy? This litany of pain and broken families serves a political purpose. It breeds cannon fodder for the socialist politician.

The leftist politician talks about helping people, but it's a lie. The politician WANTS people divorced, and kids in institutions. They WANT broken families on welfare. They WANT the elderly to be living off of Social Security. They WANT ghettos full of angry people. They WANT one group pitted against another for a share of the pie.

Every shattered, angry and bitter person down on their knees in front of the politician, holding out his hands for alms, is another steel link in his chain of power.

Stop listening to these people. There are better ways.

*My wife is a pharmacist...maybe I should get a food taster?