David McElroy

Nobody is entirely sure what a socialist is anymore. Some people are convinced that Barack Obama is a socialist. Two years ago, Newsweek argued that both sides of the mainstream are basically big-government socialists now. And now we have a new French president from the Socialist party. So what do real socialists want?

It turns out that real socialists want pretty much the same thing as Obama and the Democrats do — more government spending, higher taxes on “the rich” and an end to planned budget cuts. Newly elected French President François Hollande says he will end “austerity” in the country, which basically means he’s going to take as much money as he can from productive people and spend like there’s no tomorrow.

Government spending in European countries has been so bad that the idea of reducing spending to at least start trimming deficits is called austerity. Just as is the case here, the people who want the spending to continue say that “the rich” have the responsibility to pay more — because people who are now being supported by government would have to support themselves otherwise.

The standard rhetoric in this country is to claim that those who want to balance the budget want to “balance the budget on the backs of the poor,” but the idea is the same. The idea is that those who are already being supported by productive people deserve to continue to get that support — and it’s “greedy” for “the rich” not to want to work hard and have their money confiscated to be given to other people.

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Thomas died just a few minutes before 5 p.m. If you missed it, I wrote about his health situation this morning. After I made a short video that I posted around noon, I put him down to rest in a place where I knew he enjoyed lying. He stayed there all afternoon and never got up again. He was 18 years old. I’ll miss him.

I’ve never cried about the death of a human, but I cry each time I lose one of my furry friends. It’s the price we pay for enjoying the years we have with them.

I have an old friend who’s dying. You won’t read his obituary in the paper when it happens. I’m the only one who’ll notice or care. But my world will feel a little bit empty when Thomas leaves me very soon.

Some of you who have dogs or cats know the incredible attachment that many of us feel for the furry friends in our lives. They’re not just animals. They’re family. We feel real love for them — and they they need us, many times in ways that make you certain they’re capable of feeling more than some people believe.

Thomas is about 18 years old. I told the story last August of how he came to live with me, so I won’t repeat it here. He wasn’t supposed to end up here. If a woman had done what she promised to do for him, he would have ended up spending his life on a farm not too far from here. But since she didn’t, I ended up scooping him up in my arms and carrying him half a mile or so home. He’s never left — and he’s spent a good deal of the time since then in my arms.

He’s been going downhill badly since January. He’s always been a jumper, and even in his old age, he still jumped to the top of the bookcases to sleep and be alone. One day in January, he apparently fell off the top of the bookcase. He had done that many times, but this time he fell behind it, jamming his body between the wall and the bookcase almost all the way to the ground.

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