A retired minister and his wife had never owned a house.
They had spent all their married lives living in housing provided by churches.
At age 65, they bought a house and financed it for 15 years.
They had been frugal and had saved a good down payment. They paid for the house by age 80.
The value of the house increased over the years, and at age 83, they sold the house and received a very nice check. The money from the sale was enough to help them fund their next 10 years in a nice assisted-living apartment.
While taking on a mortgage at 65 appeared crazy to some, it afforded them financial security later.
Many years ago, I bought a modest new house that cost $151,000. I barely scraped together the nearly $30,000 down payment. The house was financed for 15 years. I began the laborious journey of writing a monthly check to the bank. After about eight years, I needed money to pay medical bills and was able to borrow $30,000 against my equity.
The beginning of the war on terror at the turn of the century coincided with the creation of new euphemisms to describe things that were already well defined.
Although military idioms have long tortured language for the sake of specious arguments, there was a new audacity in the way it was being reshaped to excuse the inexcusable.
Torture, for example, became “enhanced interrogation,” and it didn’t take long for images to leak from Abu Ghraib in Iraq showing the sadism that condoning it had unleashed on those held there, 70 to 90% of whom were innocent.
Even the supreme international crime, what amounted to a war of aggression, was sold as a “humanitarian intervention” in Libya, a country that is still in the throes of violent chaos more than a decade later.
The slippery slope represented by this NATO action has become clear in the years since, as various regional powers like Turkey, the UAE and Qatar have intervened there and thrown money and arms at a variety of unsavory actors.
