Flu Season! Yuck!

It appears that my household will not be spared from the flu this year, after all. My healthy teenagers have, blessedly and all at the same time, become ill. The fever, body aches, nausea, sore throats, headaches and generally crappy feeling have hit us all at once.

As "the mom" I'm not permitted to get sick at the same time as the rest of the family, and certainly if I do get sick I will be stuck here, alone, to care for and tend to my own illness. I feel like this is what the Obama administration is doing to moms everywhere.

We're being expected to care for our families, tend to the youth of America, and when it's our turn to be taken care of, when we're old and frail, we'll be left on our own. I think about the promises that our government made to my generation, that if we would just keep paying all of those taxes that we, too, would find our pot of gold at the end of our lifelong rainbow. We were assured that Social Security was solvent, that the actuarial computations made for sustaining the program were sound. We were given this promise when we were still in diapers, all through high school and college, and into our early careers. We kept sending out our messages of doubt, asking our elected representatives to be honest with us. "Please tell us the truth!", we begged.

Congressman Claude Pepper of Florida made his entire career on fighting for Social Security benefits increases for senior citizens. He pushed hard for increased spending for Medicare, for better protections for senior citizens rights. As a young person I despised him. My thought was that the old farts should just go off an die. Now I am the old fart, and the kids just want me to go off and die.

I will admit that my generation provided little sacrifice to this Nation. My generation was the one that protested "the establishment". My generation hung Richard Nixon out to dry. My generation embraced Mao, Che, Castro, Kruschev. My generation made love - not war. My generation wanted equality for all, but we also embraced class warfare as a religion.

So when you wonder how we got to where we are today, look at today's 50 and 60 year olds.