A couple days ago I had to stand in line behind an elderly disabled man who was picking up about a dozen prescriptions but didn’t have the money to pay for all of them, so he had to go through them all and pick out the most important ones he could afford. It was a big ordeal and I was standing in line forever because of course the pharmacy was understaffed and they never opened another line. I had already stood in line once already but my prescriptions weren’t ready yet so this was a repeat trip for me.
I genuinely felt bad for the guy, which helped me to stay patient through the whole thing, and I also felt bad for the old lady who was helping him. To her credit she never lost her patience or showed the slightest hint of annoyance. It was only after I got my turn that I found out she had been even a little annoyed. Me, I will admit a few sighs escaping me, but they really weren’t sighs of annoyance so much as sighs of exasperation because I was sick and I really did not feel good. When I finally got my turn the old lady apologized and thanked me for my patience. I told her I thought she had the patience of a saint. I got my prescriptions and went home.
There is nothing funny or farcical about this week’s column. It’s just another story about living in a country where people have to stand in line forever when they’re sick because national chain pharmacies are too cheap to hire enough people and because old men have to choose between which of the medications they need they are actually going to get. I won’t even blame Donald Christ for all that but at best he sure as hell isn’t helping anything and at worst he is the living embodiment of the sort of thinking and mentality that has led America into such dire and disgraceful straits. But Donald or no Donald, it’s really just a story about America. Because that’s just the way America is. It isn’t that we couldn’t change it if we wanted to. We just don’t want to. Or at least we don’t want to bad enough. We just like the way things are too much.
But things can’t stay the same forever, and if you spend all your time trying to keep everything the same, or make it the way it was before, then you never spend any time dreaming or planning for the future.
The only future anyone plans for today is today. It’s as if everyone has already given up on tomorrow because we know ourselves too well and know we’re never going to get off our asses to do anything to change the tomorrow we have already in our hearts accepted. We have locked ourselves into the perfect self-defeatist vicious cycle.
Of course there is always the key, dangling right there just beyond the merry-go-round like a shiny brass ring, but almost everybody is too afraid to reach out and grab it. They’ve had their hands smacked too many times. And of course the ones doing the smacking were all those people who were too afraid to try to grab it for themselves.
Coming from a mystic time traveller that all means more than you probably think it does.
As my old trucker buddy Schmelnoz the Incomprehensible used to say, “Let thems that’s gots their ears on do the hearing!”
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