As a youngster, I clearly remember my sainted mother telling us stories about her pre-1920 upbringing in apartments in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that had a foreign fascination compared to our circumstance in a one-family house on Staten Island. For example, to “ring the bell” referred to water tanks for toilets that were near the ceiling and had long pull chains. (What sticks in the minds of children.)

Once she told us about a working man in a boarding house who always came home late from his job, exhausted. Before he collapsed into bed in his upstairs room, he’d take off his heavy shoes, one at a time, and drop them on the floor — thud, then a second thud — which woke up all the boarders who had just gotten to sleep. Every night: thud; then after a pause, thud again. The boarders complained and complained to the landlord.

Finally, one night the man dropped his first shoe with a thud, then remembered the complaints. So he gently placed the second shoe on the floor and went to sleep. But the whole wide-awake house of boarders could not go back to sleep. They were waiting for the other shoe to drop.

So let us now discuss Washington, D.C., where the Legislature has again kept us all holding our breath through the thud of a shutdown followed by the thud of a debt ceiling crisis. A repeat of the same threats we have held our breath through time and time again.

As my predecessor, Tom Pappas, always said: “The bad guys never go away.” And here they go again.

The so-called “Grand Bargain” is back in play. And in Republican hands that always means going after the Affordable Health Care Act, “Obamacare,” and/or entitlements. As the AFL-CIO warns, “for America’s working families, the Grand Bargain is a Grand Bamboozle.”

The Grand Bargain tax reform is aimed directly at the middle class — tax exclusion for health insurance and home mortgage deductions. But it fails to restore fair taxation for the top 1 percent by failing to raise the capital gains rate, create new high-income brackets or impose a financial transaction tax.

As for entitlements, they are coming after Social Security again. They would cut our hard-won cost of living allowance with the “chained” CPI, raise the retirement age, and means-test benefits — each one a benefit cut. A small faction of one half of one branch of the government held everyone else hostage by closing down the government after refusing to pass a “clean CR” — a straightforward continuing resolution needed to keep the government operating at a cost of billions of taxpayer dollars. Then they threatened to refuse to pay our bills on items the Congress had already voted for by refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling.

The outcome of this dangerous hostage game was an interim appropriations bill, which authorized current spending through Jan. 15. The ball has again been kicked a few months down the road.

In the meantime, the RTC passed a resolution that was then passed by AdCom and sent to the Executive Board. The Executive Board passed an amended resolution based on the revised situation. That resolution [below], which will be voted on by the Delegate Assembly, commends the president and Senate leadership for hanging tough against these continuing threats and urging them to continue to do so.

Resolution to support President Obama and the Senate Democratic majority

WHEREAS, President Obama and the Democratic majority of the U.S. Senate refused to consider extortionate proposals to defund the Affordable Care Act in order to fund the government and to raise the debt ceiling limit, and

WHEREAS, a continuing resolution for funding the government through Jan. 15 and for raising the debt ceiling limit through Feb. 7 was passed including the creation of a Congressional commission to discuss budget issues before those expiration dates, be it

RESOLVED, that the UFT urge our members to reach out to President Obama and their Democratic senators to applaud and support their continued adamant refusal to give in to extortionate Republican demands to defund the Affordable Care Act, and be it further

RESOLVED, that the UFT urge our members to reach out to urge the president and their lawmakers to refuse adamantly any suggestions in the Budget Commission to cut into, reduce or means-test Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits.

While we are still waiting for the other shoe to drop, we have to stay vigilant and poised for action. The president and Senate must listen to retirees, organized labor and other progressives. But if they start to make some dangerous moves, we’ll be ready to hit the barricades and fight for what is right.