Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
We all make them. We may deny doing so, engaging it, silently participating in the informal sport of it all, but we nevertheless join in — that judging eye for the look, the appearance, or maybe sometimes even the substance. Comparisons are performed each and every day of our lives — by ourselves; by others; publicly or in the insular universe of private thoughts. Appearance; demeanor, voice inflections; vocabulary used; […]
The mud of life is the stuff of movies; we can romanticize it, serialize it into a best-selling paperback novel (skipping over the formality of a hardback in order to sell to the masses), and even turn it into a weekly television series; but in the end, what it means is that we are stuck in a rut at a gas station in the middle of a desolate desert with no money and no prospects. That is the metaphor of the phrase itself; there is little hope and even a fewer scintilla of a possibility of a potentiality to hope; many times removed, the mud of life is that period that we all hit now and again, where movement forward will never occur, and misery is the fated future forever and a day, […]
We tend to delay that which we know is best for us, and embrace the moment for which we pay a dear price. Man was created to engage projects; a purpose for life, a value for living, a reason to live. Why it is important to initiate, continue, accomplish and involve, are considerable in quantity: to make a living; to be compensated for work employed; to create and construct for the betterment of community and the greater world; and not merely because Heidegger posits that it is to avoid our mortality and the inevitability of our fate. […]
In those Eisenhower years with residual trails into the following decade, we had those perfect television paradigms – of “Leave it to Beaver”, “Father knows best” and “My Three Sons”, while the world around began its transformational process. Hollywood decided much later that they needed to be at the forefront, leading social change and forcing cultural avant-garde transitions even if merely experimental and questionable for any positive good. That decision is in stark contrast to the turmoil of the 1960s and 70s, where the staid and stodgy traditionalism of television series barely reflected the reality of the deconstructionism occurring in real time. […]
We are, for the most part, clueless in most things. Those very limited subjects of which we are deemed an “expert” or having some partial knowledge about, are merely one in a million, and so we walk around thinking highly of ourselves, yet clueless in 99.9% of everything else. Fortunately, there is no criminal statute that can be imposed upon being clueless. Life is complex enough without having to acknowledge that we walk about without any real idea as to how to tackle the problems; but as braggadocio wins the day for most people, […]
We all engage in it; it is the genre of modernity by which one values and estimates. With the shrinking world through sharing of information in this technological age, the greater minds have proposed that poverty can be erased and world hunger can be eradicated. But in the reality of the microcosmic world of daily living, it has allowed everyone to peer into the living rooms of all, and in the process, the heightened camaraderie through shared information has become exponentially magnified. […]
Futuristic novels and foretelling of inventive creativity reveal an aspect of humankind in multiple forms: imagination transcending time, but coupled with fear and angst which is often the fodder for science fiction and impending technological anxieties. They constitute, of course, the flip side of a singular coin: fear on the one hand, and imagination fed by the fear, on the other. […]