Independent Dependence

We assume our readers are intelligent enough to sigh and roll their eyes when the news media serve up the day's portion of debt-default horror. Will the Marines in Afghanistan get paid? Will great-grandmother be turned out of the nursing home? It's odd (not really) that the "nightmare" is never couched in terms of shuttering the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Transportation.

What's more interesting to us is just exactly what the spirit of the times considers to constitute the unthinkable. Which brings us to a standard, throw-away story posted today by CNN titled "Seniors: We need our Social Security!" It's the usual but, for some reason, this popped out for us:

For some, a loss of Social Security income could mean a loss of independence.

Charles Tanner moved to an apartment near his daughter's home in Lexington, Ohio, after his wife died. It's important to the 81-year-old former welder to live on his own.

But if he stops receiving his $1,400 Social Security check, he doesn't know how he'll be able to pay the rent in coming months. That means he'd have to move in with his daughter.

"It would be a sorry day if it happens," said Tanner.

Which is to say that here in the fantasyland we've built, among the disasters ranking with war, pestilence, and volcanic eruption is . . . dependence on one's family; more specifically, an elderly father becoming dependent on his grown children. Those would be the children who, decades ago, he worked to clothe, feed, educate, and protect, and launch into adulthood.

To be dependent on a faceless, soulless bureaucratic Government is to be "independent," while to rely on one's family is to be shamed and "dependent."

Unthinkable.