OPM Disability Retirement Benefits: “Where is it written?”

When rights are asserted, community dissipates.  When, once in years of yore, before modernity complicated the simplicity of human interaction and integrity of society’s binding ties, a handshake was all that was necessary to ensure the continuity of words spoken and promises committed.  Of course, con men and worthless statements of vacuity unfettered in boundless dishonesty have always existed, especially when such events quickly spread word within a cohesive community […] Read More …

OPM Federal Employee Disability Retirement: A traveler’s perspective

How is it that a tourist can see the same building which local people pass by every day, as something of an attraction worthy of encapsulating and embalming for posterity’s sake, with a click of the camera? What is it about the eye of the traveler which is different from the staid repetitiveness of the citizen occupying for decades, centuries, and eons long forgotten, which challenges the uniqueness of stability and contrasts it as against the unwanted forces of change? Like tectonic shifts, mass migrations armed with Smartphones […] Read More …

FERS Disability Retirement: Private hells

It is a familiar refrain to note that everyone has a self-contained “private hell”; and an even greater understanding that it is well that such thoughts of other hells are both private, and for the most part, left silent without conveyance or communication. But that is changing, in large part, because people believe that mass dissemination of information has now unleashed any unspoken decorum of dignified discretion. We believe, now, that everyone should “tell all”; that private matters once left as remnants of shameful self-confessions should be publicized because it is healthy for the inner soul to be uncovered. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirements: The verse of 1-liners

Can a verse stand alone, isolated in its metrical composition, without preceding or succeeding contextual delineations? Of what value can the singular have, without the surrounding aggregation of the whole? Like a scrap or fragment of a larger narrative revelation, of archaeologists and anthropologists working with but a piece of the greater story, the verse of 1-liners forever echoes for a harkening of others to join. John Donne poetically captured the sense of that isolation, and Thomas Merton wrote a reflective narrative upon that very theme […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Riddance of the debasing alloy

It is always that minor impurity which devalues the whole; “but for” the element identified as an invasive component, the rest would constitute the purity of perfections. It is how we point fingers and bemoan the state of our own affairs; and how we make of a peripheral inconsequence the centrality of our problems. The evil that we identify as the foundational source of a problem is merely the canard for justification, and in the end, we don’t want it to go away, but to remain as fodder to fester as the legitimate basis of an illegitimate claim. […] Read More …