It's so exciting to get a comment on this blog that I feel bad taking issue with it, but I don't think that The Atlantic writer was recommending communal living instead of home ownership. I think that the gulag and Easy Rider (such a smug, preachy movie that I'm sure the hippies on the commune choked on their own self satisfaction) should have put paid to that notion. Ananias and Sapphira are always with us. There is also evidence that a nation of homeowners has social benefits. Here's a link to a completely unbiased report put together by the REALTORs
Our own American version of communal wealth sharing is, of course, Social Security. Here I need to mention something blindingly obvious; normally the spotlight on this blog is focused so tightly on my self pity that ants standing nearby might burst into flame. But for just a moment I'm broadening the beam slightly to mention that my sister's husband of many years passed away this weekend after a long, painful wasting away. Leah saw them when she was in Seattle last month, and thought he was in good spirits and amazingly sharp, but finally, as something will be for all of us, the disease was too much.
Social Security's web site, or more likely, Social Security itself, is too complicated for the uninitiated to understand. It appears, though, that people that are sixty years old can collect a survivor benefit, but not until they have been sixty for at least a month. I'm not trying to arouse outrage here, or even change the system, but doesn't that seem like an awfully specific and puzzling requirement?
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