The no option option.

Now that my 65th birthday is less than 6 months away, I'm starting to get large numbers of e-mails trying to sell me motorized wheelchairs, "mobility" devices, diabetes supplies, reverse mortgages, medicare supplement plans and other stuff I don't need and don't want and have no use for. What do they know that I don't know? Nothing at all, it's just that we're all being sorted and filed like those old Holerith cards the young and hip no longer remember and finding that the many headed beast of commerce has put us in the out box can come as a shock.

For some it may be a shock to find that we haven't been a nation of individuals and individualists able to define ourselves for ourselves as the myth would have it, but things to be sorted, labeled used or put on the shelf as the corporate barons decide. It gets increasingly hard, but keeping off the conveyor belt that the great Deus ex Corporation uses to transport us from cradle to grave is worth it and I think all the more with every passing year and with the diminishing respect that goes with it.

Why, when retaining that respect, retaining the ability to steer one's life, to change it's course, to decide which road to take next, is increasingly the center of an aging person's consciousness do people insist that it's in my best interest to cover my eyes, take my hands off the wheel and trust to luck and to someone who benefits from my dying soon?

When the people would just as soon get rid of you, that's when -- and people like Sarah Palin and her coven of demented familiars certainly don't care if there are "Death Panels" in the Democratic health plan because they know of, tolerate and are supported by the death panel industry: the insurance companies. Every one that can read and does read knows that it's absolute fiction, but they keep trying to keep the meme alive and alive it remains despite absolute proof to the contrary: the government will come to your house and talk you into suicide. A government panel will decide to keep you from getting treatment to keep costs down. Sarah Says. Fox says. the billions the Insurance companies are pouring into lobbyists says. over and over until the lie becomes flesh.

How can the President make a speech and speak louder than all that money? I don't know, I can barely bring myself to hope that for once in my lifetime the magic word "socialism" won't stun our minds into submission to authority. I hesitate to hope that people will even bother to listen to him, or at least not the people who need to. I don't bother to hope much at all these days.