Hope is a necessary component to life. When one is born, there are rarely instructional manuals which accompany the organic package of severed umbilical cord, amniotic fluid, blood and plasma formed by hydrostatic forces beyond ordinary knowledge or wisdom; the entity appears, and we are left to our own devices. But “life” cannot exist in a vacuum, though we are forged by admonitions that the tough road ahead should be traveled with fortitude, “rugged individualism” (whatever that is), and independence tantamount to abandonment.
Somehow, to live separately, away from one’s family and unit of security, is the mark of “maturity” in the West, whereas the rest of the world recognizes that the essence and value of hope lay not in separation, but within the bosom of a caring community. And so we defer the one component which becomes a necessary essence in order to strive onward: hope.
Hope deferred means that there is a hope upon a hope; that, one day, in some faraway land in fairytales which garner and engender a twinkle of faith in a world without charity, love or the emotional health of civilizations now lost and torn apart, we may stumble upon that which we had to delay in order to maintain our sanity.
And so we engage in those distracting projects which Heidegger pointed out (yes, that very same philosopher who took up the cause of the Third Reich, whether because of fear or belief in a false mythology that promised nothing but black boots, destruction and toil by fear) those many years ago, where avoidance of the ultimate terminus of Being is why we descend into inane conversations of untimely concerns.
Which is also why the loss of innocence so early in life, where fairytales and mythologies once enjoyed have been replaced in modernity by stories barely masked as propaganda and indoctrination, is the pathway towards despair; no longer of glass slippers or castles in the sky, but of political correctness and belief in the system of ideologies; for, a society fragmented can only retain its semblance of sanity by keeping the masses in a dazed opioid of tethered slumber.
It is when the mature realization hits us that the deferred hope – which is a hope-upon-hope – will likely remain unrealized, thus undermining the prefatory hope and debasing the foundational hope, that angst, despair and despondency sets in. Until that moment, we have that thin thread of faith in a fragile collection of psychic composite, barely held together by some miracle of superglue, yet enough to keep us motivated in a society filled with vacuity of hopelessness in a deep chasm of endless travesties.
For the Federal employee and U.S. Postal workers whose career is about to be cut short by a medical condition, such that the medical condition necessitates the preparation, formulation and filing of an effective Federal Disability Retirement application with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the deferred hope of attaining a semblance of health and reversal of sleep deprivation may be gotten by the steps taken towards an OPM filing.
If there is yet a deferred hope unrealized, it may be time – whether the Postal or Federal worker is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset – to actualize that potentiality left in a well of past procrastination, by preparing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, thus realizing that hope once deferred, and now within grasp and sight of embracing a promising future.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Esquire
OPM Disability Retirement, Et Cetera… 