Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
Whether consciously or not, that is the question we ask of ourselves. Is there enough of me? Meaning: Is life worthwhile such that the “me” exists substantially to reach a level of happiness, contentment and joy? The worker, the parent, the friend, the husband or wife — they are certainly part of every person’s role within society, but there is a separate, private “me” that is defined by the uniqueness of each individual. […]
They are now in most localities, in communities throughout, cropping up like a movement that pervades imperceptibly in quiet amalgamations like forces that cannot be seen but are still known to exist. Farmer’s markets represent the strength of a community, the support of a town and the reverting-back of a city, to a time where local farmers were important and the packaged foods that come from foreign countries […]
It is perhaps the single telling factor of a generational divide; if you own a landline, it is likely you are not a millennial. Or from the generation just before, or even the one before that. You are probably from the generation sometime within the timeframe of “just after” the Korean War and around the end of the Vietnam War. It is the remembrance of unreliable “bag” phones and cellular connections that barely became audible; but more than that, it is the evidence of who one is based upon the generational divide […]
They all constitute the arena of “make-believe”. Yet, we excuse the first, ignore the second, and feel guilt and shame for embracing the third – or, at least some of us, do. Of fairytales, we share in the delight of passing on such tall tales of wonderlands and Eskimo nights full of shooting stars and talking Polar Bears; of mythologies, we recognize the need for lost civilizations to have embraced a means of explaining, but consider such trifles to be beyond the sophistication of modernity, and arrogantly dismiss such dusty irrelevancies as mere fodder for a fairytale told: […]
The aggregate of knowledge as amassed by any given society does not constitute a unique culture, identifiable as distinct from all others; otherwise, as general knowledge is disseminated throughout and across national and international zones of distinguishing features, all cultures would remain the same. Culture precedes knowledge, and is the driving force which specifies the direction of it. The relevance; the choice between what is accepted and subsumed; the normative constraints and demarcations which preserve the very distinctiveness of any given culture; these are what focuses the idiosyncrasies of the preserve. […]