I walked into Office Depot last Monday with intent to discover if I had some credits to my account properly placed to my name. I remembered I had recycled ten spent ink cartridges at the first of September, yet was told I had a zero balance in credit. I was going to print out 200 business cards for the exact endeavor this blog represents. With a balance of twenty dollars that should have been to my name, that would mean I’d have roughly three dollars in fees I’d owe for 200 cards. That’s quite a bargain by most standards. Their next door neighbors at the UPS store could certainly do a great job. They’d done so for me before. Obsviously, these credits were earned so Office Depot was where I had to be. I knew there was a possibility it would be confirmed that I still had a zero balance instead and that the first numbers where ‘incorrectly’ correct. Having dealt with incompetence and lack of follow through from past experiences with that store, to my dismay they were. The staff member who took my cartridges one month earlier, had either pretented like he had completed the transaction to make me believe he was doing his job or honestly tried to do it and failed. Either way it was not a good reality from a customer service perspective. Coming back to give more cartridges for recycle so I could accrue some type of savings, I saw one of the attendents who fielded my complaint on Monday give the other attendent a facial expression as if to say he’s an aggrevation. Suffice it to say, My opinion of the place was as low as ever and validated by the number of complaints against that particular store I’d read on review sites that afternoon. All of this against the backdrop of necessary unionizing efforts all across the country.
Reader, right now in America we are experiencing the worst of the worst in society when it comes to two dynamics: greed/ethics and character. Greed and ethics are problems conservatives are not willing to acknowledge. Workplace character is a problem liberals are not willing to realize. CEO and corporate greed are obvious reasons we are seeing more workers unionize and quite frankly it is a neccesity they do so in our modern times. We are quickly arriving at a place harkening back to the early 1900’s. Times that made writers like Upton Sinclair so prominent. Pick up an order at any drive through, check out from any counter from any store, give any attendent your plane ticket and see how long it takes for them to be rude and incompetent and also entitled to keep their job. Some suing former employers claiming some form of baseless descrimination when terminated. Older Americans who learned the value of integrity and hard work see this type of behavior and you better believe it affects the way they vote. In a ‘partially perfect’ world we’d be plagued by only one of these problems being able to blame a culprit, one side more clearly to rememdy the situation. Young readers these instances of indifference and incompetence are examples of what older conservative voters see when they vote against things like universal healthcare. In their mind, right or wrong, they don’t want to provide their hard earned tax dollars to a slug who hasn’t earned their keep. Older, conservative readers; the Federalist Society, Peter Thiel and greatest wage gap our nation has ever seen is what younger voters see when they vote against your time honored traditions and visceral values and your mantra of what America should be. Over the last decade I’ve personally voted both Republican and Democrat! I can say I’ve felt fury against both perspectives and continue to in hope of a better society.
That’s why we are in a stalemate of not truly solving America’s problems when it comes to labor, healthcare and economics in general. We are two sides that have a black and white canned view on the matter driving us into two extreme camps, not willing to take the blame for both our faulty logic. Which is exacerbated by talking points we never take the time to research and see how they apply to everyday life. To the right and to the left, you need to start seeing the other perspective and their realities. Ultra conservatives, ‘loose’ liberals, you need to get some color in your thinking! Because seeing things in too simplified of terms ain’t working for us who see things in the middle. And right now you are making us as mad as if Peter Thiel just hacked up our order at McDonalds.
