I sometimes ponder on the state of our world today.  My mother is still one of the hardest working women I’ve ever known.  She still grows a huge garden, cans and freezes her harvest, cooks for ‘the boys’ two meals a day, and tends her flowers.  Her hands were so swollen from peeling peaches a couple of weeks ago, she was out of commission for a day or two.  Yet, she keeps getting by.  Her social security check helps he squeak by, and she refuses money from any of us kids.  She has her pride.  Now the unfair part:  Why is someone who never worked or put money into Social Security able to draw more per month than my mother (and thousands of other retirees) who worked for most of their lives and paid into the program?  I know there are some cases where government help is needed, but able bodied people?  There are jobs that need to be done-cleaning our roadsides, yardwork around public buildings, cleaning up public parks and recreation areas-the list goes on.  But ‘pride’ makes some people think that kind of work is beneath them.  I’ll take my mother’s kind of pride (which is earned) over the unearned pride of some of these freeloaders.  And don’t tell me that there isn’t enough money.  If the greedy politicians could have kept their hands off of the Social Security money as it was paid in, it could have been invested and made money.  They put in plenty, but our ‘leaders’ were not good stewards of the money they paid.  Maybe we should take money from the politicians who dipped into the funds for their pet projects and invest it to put money back into SS.  And that’s all I have to say about that!