nourishing obscurity

I simply do not understand why Angus Dei is not on everyone’s must read list but perhaps it’s a slow build.   This post must rate as one of his best yet:

The few seemingly lost souls that happen on my piss poor blog for whom I am eternally grateful may have noticed that it is not what you would call “intellectual” or “deep” or even informed.

What it is however is my take on a world that is increasingly sinking into the dark depths of unfairness, inequality and prejudice.

Which brings me to today’s musing:

Being one of the “Baby Boomers” I am a fair way along the path to retirement age, as are millions of others I am in my very late fifties; we have managed to reach our inestimable age mainly by pure luck, but on the way we have worked hard, paid our taxes and tried to stay law abiding.

But it seems that growing older is the new target of the Dysfunctional Coalition Family, they want to change the retirement age to sixty seven in the next couple of years, and eventually to seventy or beyond (Bud Lightyear I aint), they want to make us pay thousands of pounds for our care in our dotage, and worse of all they don’t give a shit about the old who are poor.

“They” seem to think that because we have managed to stagger to our increasing number of years we have oodles of loot in the bank, huge pensions to keep us in the manner we haven’t been accustomed to and assets that we can flog off to pay for what the Government is responsible for-our care.

Growing old should be a good time, we should be able to stop working after forty or fifty years. Settle back and do the things that we haven’t had the time to do because we have been slaving away to pay for the education and nurturing of the young, so that said young would sustain us while we go Ga-Ga and descend into incontinence and our second childhood.

But it seems this isn’t going to happen because there aren’t enough “young” to carry out this spiffing plan, it seems that us old farts are stuffed, we are going to be expected to work until we drop, thus saving all that pension money, and care that we won’t need because we will all be dead.

And even if we do manage to totter on to retirement in our drool soaked clothing a lot of us can look forward to living in poverty, and instead of deciding where we will go on our Hols, we will be worrying whether to pay the heating bills or buy food.

Successive Governments have buried their heads in the trough and ignored the fact that there will be a lot of old people very soon.

They have pissed our retirement away on billions for NHS managers, quangos, consultants, wars, banks and the EU.

They failed to see the crash coming (see yesterday’s post) and plunged us all into the “Brown” runny stuff because they thought that “now” is the most important thing, apart from winning the Election and feathering their own nests of course.

Next year I will reach sixty, without seemingly a free bus pass, free swimming or any chance of finally being able to have a rest.

I would like to thank the Tories, Labour and that other lot for fucking up my future, what there is of it.

A couple of days ago I saw one of the most ignorant columns in a newspaper – it might have been the BBC or Guardian or somewhere else I never comment but the writer was clearly Gen X and he was moaning that the Boomers owned all that wealth, doing nothing to get it and now expect us Gen Xers to bail them out while they sit on their fat behinds claiming a pension that we Gen Xers are paying for.

One thing the Boomers are possibly responsible for is allowing people like that writer to grow up so ignorant. Every generation of working age has paid for the preceding generation in retirement and the Boomers are no different. They paid for the Silent Generation’s pensions and those of the end of the War Generation, they didn’t quibble over it and along the way, yes – they made some money in most cases.

The downside of the Boomers is that they never really grew up and are still partying, which is unfortunate because age is catching up with them quickly now, as Angus pointed out. That a large percentage of the over 65s is now in debt is testimony to both the banksters who have forced prices to unrealistic levels, something which affects all of us and part of the game plan – in Europe clearly pursued by people like Heath and cronies … plus the Boomers’ natural profligacy.

So yes, they must reap the whirlwind for that but as for that prat suggesting that Gen X can renege on the Boomer’s pensions, an always assumed agreement of all generations with the preceding one, then I’d love to see the same happen to him with Gen Y and Z twenty years down the track – see how he likes it then. I’ll tell him one thing – Gen Y are showing no inclination to pay anything out to anyone at this stage so it should be interesting days ahead.

Not just on account of Brown raiding the pension funds but looking at the overall picture, has there been a generation in the last eight or so which faces such abject ruin coming into pension age as the Boomers? Seriously, they are in deep faeces. Part of that is the game plan, the agenda to destroy the middle class and part is the shrinking taxbase at the same time as the burgeoning Boomer retiree population.

It’s been coming a long time, I read warnings in the paper in the 80s about what would be going down but naturally, few heeded those warnings. Even then, the pollies hinted that they’d renege on “rationalize” the whole pension idea and what they will now have on their hands is a large portion of the population unemployed, ill and increasingly on the street.

It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Filed under: Politics & economics, Society & human issues