Wisconsin politician and newly selected Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan was in The Villages yesterday to speak to the thousands of Northern retirees who live in the massive central Florida community. The Republican candidate reassured these aged Yankees that Mitt Romney and he would prevent any cuts to their favourite government programs. Chris Moody has the story for Yahoo News:
Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan wrapped his first solo tour as Mitt Romney’s running mate at the famous retirement community here Saturday, taking his message of Medicare reform to seniors in a crucial swing state.
Standing between two signs that read “Protect and Strengthen Medicare,” Ryan made the most personal case for overhauling Medicare yet during his time on the campaign trail. With his mother, 78-year-old Betty Ryan Douglas, standing near him on the stage, Ryan discussed how the Medicare program has played a role in his own family’s life.
“Like a lot of Americans, when I think of Medicare, it’s not just a program. It’s not just a bunch of numbers. It’s what my mom relies on. It’s what my grandma had,” Ryan said. He told of how his grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease and moved into his mother’s home when he was in high school. “Medicare was there for our family, for my grandma, when we needed it then. And Medicare is there for my mom while she needs it now and we have to keep that guarantee.”
Hundreds of seniors from the neighborhood came out in support of Ryan, while a few protestors stood on the outskirts holding signs against against Ryan’s Medicare plan. A small plane flew over the rally carrying a banner reading, “Paul Ryan: Keep Your Hands Off My Medicare!”
The Villages, where Ryan spoke, was founded as a colony of elderly Yankees back in the 1960s by Harold Schwartz, a Michigan businessman. It has since grown to enormous size, becoming one of the prime places for Yankees to await death, thousands of miles from their native culture, homes, families and friends.
Click here for much more information on the Yankee colony
I wonder why people don’t want to spend their “golden” years surrounded by the friends, family, institutions, culture and environment they grew up in. I can understand them liking the warm weather of the South. But normally after living in an area for 60+ years there should be tight bonds to the people, culture, and land that should be hard to break. I have no understanding as to why they choose to flock to South after they retire.
Concerning Medicare, “conservatives” at one point and time opposed Great Society programs. Now they sound like the Left. Medicare is now a sacred golden cow to them. When someone like Paul Ryan frames the debate like he has, it makes it harder to tell the hard truth that the program has to be cut or else the Federal government will go bankrupt (which isn’t a bad thing to me). It also makes it easier to justify future tax increases (which Republicans supposedly oppose) to keep the system afloat. Any brave person would tell people that programs like Medicare don’t work (ask many doctors about the state of their medical practices) and causes healthcare costs to rise. There are only two commodities that consistently have yearly cost increases that outpace inflation. They are college tuition and medical care. Both of these (not surprisingly) are heavily subsidized by the Federal government, which isn’t a coincidence.
Only Southern people still have families, and even understand “family” as extended kinship groups.
The people down there now seem all NET’s (northeast transplants) and largely catholic, but some jews. They see the whole of south florida as either catholic or jewish neighborhoods, so in a sense they are with their people. But a “family” for them is just their children, and they see the world through the lens of money. They went to florida for tax reasons. It’s the only reason they are there. They never had any thought or care for the real Floridians they displaced (who fled due to the fact that living around Latinos and jews doesn’t allow them to really live their own kind of southern cultural life) and also, it then quickly became “mexican,” (since the NET’s have no connection to the earth in the way Southerner’s do, and they cannot do any of their own yard work, or planting, or landscaping and so on and have to have “slaves” do it for them (while accusing real southerners of the ones being that way, lol)
In our area, the Landscaping is awful, just like S. FL or any other NET area. Unless you’ve spent time in the Northeast, you can’t even understand what has happened. But they landscape homes as if they are Apartment Buildings! It’s all they know (this is the reason their landscaping is so ugly). Their ‘mexicans’ rush in, slap up really hardy no-care plants that “crews” can come and leaf blow on a schedule. It is highly unnatural looking.
But they have never had yards before. That’s the real reason they just mulch whole hills, lol. Also, some of the houses are thankfully put close together. It is very un-Southern, but at least it speaks to what they really want: larger apartments than they had in the northeast. They have no use at all for yards.
When the NET’s buy up the one gracious avenue in town, with the beautiful old homes, it is only a matter of time until they are cut up into apartments for some dough. And whatever is left of the old southern graciousness is destroyed. Before that, they mexican-landscape them, also. Not to mention paint them bizarre colors and so on.
THEN you’ll find landscaping on the corners of roads. The REAL reason for this is NET’s have often never driven cars before. In NYC it costs about $3-500.00 A MONTH to park a car. So, since they’ve never driven, when their overseers come to run the (mexican) “landscape” crews, they put huge bushes on corners (not realizing it will obscure traffic). Many wrecks have been caused.
A theory on why they have multiple vehicles per person is that they often are spending others’ money anyway (tax supported “careers” so they just spend and spend) and also because it was so expensive to park cars wherever they came from, that the cars are a real monetary status symbol for them.
Anyway, Ryan might be able to get Pennsylvania, the way Biden did. That’s probably what they are thinking.
Florida ought to secede, and cut these “benefits” that the NETs enjoy so much. Then they will leave by the truck load. Medicare is not necessary to provide for the elderly. It’s called “family.” Your parents raised you, cared for you, fed you, changed your diapers, spent untold thousands of dollars on you. The least you can do for them when they are old is to return the favour. “Retirement homes” like The Villages are an abomination. But then again, as was already said, Yankees have no concept of family. So they don’t understand familial duty.
@ Anti-federalist: “But normally after living in an area for 60+ years there should be tight bonds to the people, culture, and land that should be hard to break. I have no understanding as to why they choose to flock to South after they retire.”
I agree. I could not leave my state of Florida for anywhere else. It is my home & it is where my people are. I’m a Cracker til the day I die. Even though my state has been Yankee-ized, there are still some of us true Southerners, especially in the northern, rural parts of the state.
One thing that always sits poorly with me are how the older generations are treated by the younger. It used to be that the younger folks took care of their older family members as much as they were able – now it seems that a lot of young folks are eager to put their aged or struggling family members in nursing homes. And I’ve known some older family members who are forced to leave their community of 60 plus years, and travel across the nation to be in a nursing home near their younger relative. Don’t kid yourself – a nursing home is where a lot of folks go to die (feeling unwanted or cast off), and it’s often not a very good environment for your loved one to spend their “golden years”.
I lived for a year in Clearwater/St. Pete in 1982/83 and lived in constant fear for my life from the Bluehairs and their non-driving skills. I had to get a new drivers license while I lived there and could not believe the old people they were handing out drivers licenses to, who consistently failed the eye exam.
I grew up as an only child and when my Mom fell and broke her hip and my Dad was in the escalating stages of Parkinsons and Alzheimers I quit my job and took care of them. Because my Dad was at the point of not really knowing right from left and would get notions of taking off on his own, I FORCED my parents to move into a facility that cared for Alzheimers patients. I HATED doing it, but my Mom never really regained her ability to walk and she was legally blind to boot, so there was no way she could wrangle my Dad. They lived there for about six months and my Dad passed. Once that happened I then bought a house which I had remodeled to look just like their home and which would accommodate a wheelchair and moved my Mom and myself into it. I was hoping that she would hang in there and we could have a few more years together. Sadly that was not to be and five months after my Dad, my Mom passed. They were married for 61 years and I truly believe because she was blind and without her Love, she no longer wished to be here.
All throughout this ordeal (and it was at times as I was her primary caregiver and she needed a lot), people would ask me (living in southern Cali) why on earth I quit my job and was taking care of my parents. They thought I was crazy and couldn’t understand why I didn’t just dump them somewhere. When I did have to move them into the Assisted Living place everyone thought I’d go back to work. I did not as I had to daily manage their care to be certain they WERE getting good care, take them to the doctors, (Dad went in and out of the hospital 3 times), handle the insurance, pay the bills, spend time with them daily so they didn’t feel abandonded, etc. There’s no way I could have worked and taken good care of them. Once my Mom and I were together after my Dad passed, I still had to do the same things with her. Plus I tried to do fun things and take her places to see things and do things she’d always wanted to do but forfeited because she was taking care of my Dad and I. I always felt it was my DUTY to care for my parents and find it to this day the most absurd thought that I would just abandon them in their greatest time of need. I DO NOT understand people who would not do otherwise. AND for the record, I was an argumenative, stubborn daughter on many occasions so it was not like we were the “Brady Bunch.” But I loved them and felt I owed it to them as I was their family and they mine.
As far as Medicare goes, I am of the “Baby Boomer” generation and have been working since I was 16 years old. I was forced to pay into that fund and have counted on it to provide for me when I retire. If that money was cut off I, along with many, many other people who paid into it and counted on it would be screwed. YES it is a FLAWED SYSTEM, but it is the ONLY SYSTEM for many of us and to end it and not refund our money is Criminal in my opinion.
SouthernAtHeart, it is certainly unjust that Medicaid has been sold as an health insurance system when it is in fact no more than a means of redistributing wealth the same as Social Security though the parties benefiting differ between the two. But unjust as its ending will be that does not change the fact that it must end because not only is it flawed as you stated but it is also fatally flawed. One positive benefit is that it may very well reverse the tide of Yankee immigration into the South. Once it does end then many of the elderly Yankees will have to move close to family members for support. No longer being subsidised by the system they’ll have to rely on family. It will simultaneously free the South from an alien political and social influence but will also do much to restore the family. But in the alternative should Medicaid be somehow reformed and the Southron states secede then many of the Yankees will have to return to their own country or potentially face the risk of loss of benefits.
The reason that Ryan is attempting to win over the Yankees is because they are going to be the key voting block in the November election. Old Yankees tend to show up no matter how unlikely it is that their vote makes a real difference.
No one in my family participated in the August primary voting due to the belief that voting does not make a difference. Many of my friends also decided to sit out of the primaries.
The primary turnout in Lake County was a dismal 22.3%, Polk County 19%. Other surrounding counties also have similar results. Summed up, it appears that most people down here realize that voting does not make a difference so there is no reason to bother with it… it only encourages the political class and allow them to claim that the “people have spoken” and that they have the “consent of the governed”.
Come this November, my family has no intentions of voting in the elections and we are encouraging everyone we know to sit out of them as well.
I’ll be sitting it out with y’all, Chad.
Read Clyde N. Wilson’s “Forgotten Conservatives in American History”.
I am exercising my right to vote this year by writing in President Grover Cleveland, the last Jeffersonian to serve in that office in American history.