Sanctimonious? No,just a bit pissed off.
Thanks for your military service but I still don’t see that a reason for six figure pension for 30 years.
Hell,I’ve gone months without electricity when we didn’t have money to pay.NO public assistance,either. I dragged 6 and 8”diameter tree limbs 250 yards across rough fields BY HAND while suffering with herniated back (uncompensated work injury) to the house so we(including my disabled father (non-smoker with COPD 30% lung function yet thrown off disability for two years)would be warm. Both in mild and in bitter freezing weather.I’ve wheelbarrowed cut pieces the same distance but uphill in other times.I’ve known what it is to eat cold food out of a can in the field and think it was GOOD!Not in ‘Nam though.I’ve gone to work hundreds of times with lunch a cheap pot pie or sandwich and little else. That WAS years ago in the 1980s.
I’ve also served the people for a few years as a ranger and had my confrontations with armed trespassers,thieves,and other emergencies.Lost that job due to local politics.
Not bragging,not whinging,just fact that a LOT of people who weren’t in the military/big government have had hardships yet don’t get to collect small fortunes for decades.I’m glad to have a steady job now even though my gross is less than your AND MANY other GOVERNMENT retirees pensions.Oh yeah,I passed plenty of tests with high scores in my younger years but no few,including the Post Office will hire “a back injury claim waiting to happen”.
Pissed off at whom?
Thanks for your military service but I still don’t see that a reason for six figure pension for 30 years.
I served 36 years, 8 years in the USN and 28 in the State Department. My pension is similar to what a three star flag officer receives. The reason is simple: It is the law of the land. Congress set the rules for how federal employees are compensated. The President signed the bills to make them law.
Hell,I’ve gone months without electricity when we didn’t have money to pay.NO public assistance,either. I dragged 6 and 8”diameter tree limbs 250 yards across rough fields BY HAND while suffering with herniated back (uncompensated work injury) to the house so we(including my disabled father (non-smoker with COPD 30% lung function yet thrown off disability for two years)would be warm. Both in mild and in bitter freezing weather.I’ve wheelbarrowed cut pieces the same distance but uphill in other times.I’ve known what it is to eat cold food out of a can in the field and think it was GOOD!Not in ‘Nam though.I’ve gone to work hundreds of times with lunch a cheap pot pie or sandwich and little else. That WAS years ago in the 1980s.
How is that relevant to my service as a federal employee? I can recite a personal history of growing up with little money. I started working as a paper boy at the age of 14. I always had a job working after school, on weekends, and during the summer ranging from washing dishes, working on a golf course, and in a supermarket. Lots of menial, hard labor.
Not bragging,not whinging,just fact that a LOT of people who weren’t in the military/big government have had hardships yet don’t get to collect small fortunes for decades.
Sounds like whining to me. You had a choice to work in government or join the military. I volunteered to enter the military during a war out of patriotic duty, not to collect a small fortune for decades.
I’m glad to have a steady job now even though my gross is less than your AND MANY other GOVERNMENT retirees pensions.Oh yeah,I passed plenty of tests with high scores in my younger years but no few,including the Post Office will hire “a back injury claim waiting to happen”.
And my gross is less than many other people. It is all relative. We all have our personal stories. I can only take responsibility for my choices and the consequences. As Jimmy Carter said, "Life isn't fair."
You have already won life's lottery by being born in the US. I have seen real poverty and hopelessness in places like India, Bangladesh, Senegal, Ethiopia, etc. Emerson said this from his essay on self-reliance:
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.