Last Updated on March 23, 2016
Lin Yutang is a preeminently accomplished writer of the last century who wrote incisive essays and works describing the great divide between China and the monolithic aggregate collectively referred to as “the West”. It was a different time of which he wrote, as the world was larger, more divided, and inaccessible to many; prejudices and biases still prevailed, and the attitudes of former colonialists still ravaged the minds of ignorance and fear, where political correctness had not yet tilted the ingrained cultural condemnations of group-think and herd mentality.
In the end, however, as with all great writers and perceptive thinkers, his spectrum of thought touched upon universal truths which captured and encapsulated the greater generic congregation of humanity, and not just the separateness relegated to the trash bin of historicity. It is a paraphrase of the description used by him, but one which he would likely have agreed to — that a complete man needed both sides of humanity: both the pulse of the heart as well as the eye of the mind, like yin and yang, emotion and rationality, objectivity and empathy. But the pendulum of time in every epoch seems never to balance well between the extremes of masculinity and femininity; we must either be all of one and vanquish the other, or deny ourselves the true origin of our own essence.
That type of behavior is often seen in the microcosm of everyday living, including those with medical conditions and disabilities in the Federal sector and the U.S. Postal Service. Whether out of fear or unforgivable ignorance, people tend to treat others with medical conditions and disabilities with a quiet disdain, lacking any import for empathy or concern for livelihood. For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers, whether under FERS, CSRS or CSRS-Offset, the only pathway out of such inhumane treatment and lack of empathetic humanity, is to file for Federal Disability Retirement benefits through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
This is not an “out” for escape, but a reality of conserving the dignity of one’s life, in order to attain a level of financial security and move on to a better and more productive phase of one’s life. For, when others lose one’s pulse of the heart, as well as deny the eye of the mind, all sense of decency and good-will becomes lost to the abyss of evil and human depravity; and as the imbalance of man’s essence brings out the worst in us, so the best option left for the Federal or Postal worker who is being harassed and pilloried at work, merely because he or she can no longer perform one or more of the essential elements of the Federal or Postal positional duties assigned, is to prepare an effective OPM Disability Retirement application before the yin is severed from the yang, and the pendulum of time swings forth to shatter the glass casing within the quietude of the chime of marching lives.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Esquire