Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: Relevant subjects and relating back

Last Updated on June 8, 2016 by FERS Disability Attorney

Is it merely a ploy?  Are all subjects discussed in order to get to the point of addressing the subject of disability retirement for Federal employees and U.S. Postal Workers?  Some might wonder; yet, from the perspective of this attorney, the answer is quite simple:  Having a medical condition, and the resulting need to prepare an effective Federal Disability Retirement application to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, is reflective of life’s multi-variegated challenges on a wider cosmic scale.

We tend to compartmentalize the trials and obstructions encountered; to say of this bump in the road, “Well, if only…”; and of that fallen tree in the pathway of our direction, “I should have done X instead of Y…”  A different perspective, however, is the interconnectedness of such travails, and to view the provocations of life within the greater context of living.

Thus, the linguistic universe of metaphors, fiction, narratives and the elasticity of language comprise the insular universe of the “self”; and whether one believes in the correspondence theory of truth — pre-Bertrand Russell and the English Logical Positivism movement — matters as to how one approaches any given problem; and the encounter with the “objective” world, whether taken with a grain of salt in embracing Kantian categories of enforced structures upon an otherwise chaotic universe, or in a systematic and methodological approach as Karl Popper did in his “scientific” construct where falsifiability and the avoidance of induction delineated the essence of human comprehension and ordering of a world otherwise incommensurate with a rational perspective; these all, in their aggregate and entirety, are relevant subjects and relate back to the experiences confronted by Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers in their struggle to find answers in a world devoid of questions posed and posited.

Thus, the introduction and prefatory remarks in each of these blogs may sometimes appear to be disconnected to the final point made for the Federal employee or U.S. Postal worker, and one can certainly “skip” the storyline and see what the end-phase content addressing the issue of Federal Disability Retirement contains; but that would be to overlook the relevance of the subject begun, and the relationship between one’s position as a Federal employee or a U.S. Postal worker under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset and the wider context in relation to all subjects far, wide and throughout history past, making in the present and developing for the future; sort of like skipping the first chapters in Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, David Copperfield, as J.D. Salinger denounced via the fictional but autobiographical character, Holden Caulfield in his equally masterful work, The Catcher in the Rye, where the story of a boy’s expulsion from a college preparatory school would represent an entire generation who saw Holden as the spark of the counter-culture to come, yet never experienced the horrors of war and combat as the author did while in the 12th Infantry Regiment — thus, further fodder for relevant subjects unspoken and relating back but to a generation yet unspoiled by the totality of experiences left for silent narratives and tombs unvisited.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire