5 Feet of Fury

Joe Bob Briggs: How CVS Invaded My Brain

Joe Bob Briggs writes:

My grandfather, a Texan who worked for the Katy Railroad and the Dallas troubleshooting division of International Telephone & Telegraph, was 30 years old when Franklin Roosevelt got the Social Security Act passed in 1935—and he refused to register. My grandmother begged him to go down to the post-office building on Bryan Street like everyone else and get his Social Security number, but he always said, “I’m not letting the government number me.”

“It’s just so they can keep track of your retirement money,” she would say.

“That’s what they say it’s for now,” he said, “but you know they’ll use it for something else.”

And, of course, 81 years later, the Social Security number is such a universal means of profiling that, if you die before the age of 65, it’s never been used even once to send you money but used several thousand times for other things, most of which fall into the category of Keeping Tabs on This Guy.

That’s why I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the lunatic-fringe Christian websites that say the EMV chip is the Mark of the Beast.