Once, mythological figures and characters looming larger than life itself wandered amidst the common populace of everyday working folks; their very presence bestowed a greater sense of purpose, of a pride in knowing that better days lay ahead, and that even in the upheavals of tempestuous travails and turmoils which interrupted every economy and fiefdom because of the inevitable vicissitudes of economic activity, that somehow we would all survive through the common efforts of community. But the pureness of the mountain stream became poisoned, diluted and polluted by egomaniacal intrusions of selfish constructs; “we” did not matter much, if at all, and the accolades of accretion demanded greater self-congratulatory spotlights of self-centered egoism.
Thus was the “selfie” born. In the midst of such a society, empathy for the disabled will be wanting and rare; the saying that he would shove his own grandmother under a moving bus is not merely a warning, but a confirmation of normative character. For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition, such that the medical condition prevents one from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, it is well to know who, and what, one is dealing with.
Agencies and Post Offices which may have shown care and comaraderie during better times, may not continue the surface-appearance of comity and cooperation when it becomes clear that the Federal or Postal employee can no longer remain as fully productive as in years past. Human nature being what it is, the self-contradiction of man’s thought processes can always amaze and delude: One believes that one is neither naive nor ignorant; concomitantly, that the world is generally an evil arena of life; but, somehow, one’s own friends, family, and agency are the exception, when the callous experiences of life have shown us otherwise.
Filing for Federal Disability Retirement benefits by the Federal employee or the U.S. Postal worker, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, is a clear indication to one’s agency or the U.S. Postal Service that you are no longer “one of us”, and more to the point, can no longer contribute to the betterment of the agency, the Postal Service, or to the advancement of management’s careers and objectives.
You become considered as mere dead weight and fodder for the wasteland of problems and pecuniary penchants of piracy and pernicious paupers. You become erased and digitally deleted from those seemingly happy images of office parties and ceremonial accolades where words of praise once were dispensed with generous helpings and heaps of adjectives and adverbs not often heard. You become the nobody that you always were perceived to be behind those lying eyes, had always been, and forever considered; you just didn’t know it before the occurrence of confirmed establishment.
Perhaps we know too much today, because information is cheap and available; and perhaps giants never roamed the earth in epochs extinguished by time and modernity; for the figures larger than life are nowhere to be found, but in what we make of our lives through sheer effort, planning, and genuine concern for the man sitting right next to us.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Esquire
OPM Disability Retirement, Et Cetera… 