"Robert A. Heinlein - Take back your Government" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

dividends, or other investment income, and they didn't give a hoot what it did
to the country!
Naturally they tended to vote for different men and different issues -
except when a candidate managed to kid both groups. But the motivation
was identical and utterly shameless - blind and narrow selfishness, short
range in nature and quite unconcerned with the welfare and future of their
children and their country.
Nor were they driven to it by hunger. One can forgive the selfishness of
hunger, but even on the wrong side of the tracks they were neither hungry
nor cold, as it happened to be in a state with, possibly, the most favorable
and generous welfare conditions in the country. No, it was the greed of old
age.
There appears to come a change in most people somewhere around the
age of fifty when they cease to think of the rest of the human race except in
terms of what others may be induced to do for them. A divorce from the
human race is not a good thing for a man's inner being; it reduces his
spiritual life to its lowest common denominator - the animal level. It is
absolutely imperative that a man care for something more than for himself for
him to remain human. Most tragically, many people, when they have reached
the age when their own children are no real responsibility and are thereby not
forced to think in terms of the welfare and future of their children, find nothing
to replace such interest. The more nearly truly human of us substitute, for a
preoccupation with the needs of our own children, after they are grown, a
wider interest in all children everywhere, and the future of the nation and the
race.
An elder citizen who has come safely through this difficult transition is a
joy to know and is likely to make your best political worker. He will labor until
the day he dies for the public welfare as he sees it, without the slightest
expectation of personal reward. He usually has enough free time to be very


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effective, his views are respected, and the physical labor of politics is within
die limits, in most cases, of even the elderly and infirm.
I remember in particular one old lady who was the mainstay in a dozen
campaigns. She lived along on a pittance and was nearly seventy when I met
her. Her first name was Laura. (I never dared call her by her first name.) Not
only did she work her own precinct and campaign among her friends, she
was usually headquarters manager and handled the field workers and the
public with cheerful tact.
Laura wanted to know only whether it was a private fight or could she get
in it, too? She was never indifferent to any public issue; she would study,
decide what was right by her values, and start pitching. I recall with pleasure
watching her shake her finger under the nose of the chairman of a school
board while scolding them all. "You gentlemen should be ashamed of
yourselves! To have the temerity to sit there and tell me, a citizen and
taxpayer of this state, that you do not intend to carry out your sworn duty!"
The fight was none of hers; it involved discrimination against a group in
which she had no remote interest. But Laura won the fight; the school board
backed down.