Milita!

"I’m so pissed! I’m joining a fucking militia"--Jason A. Wendleton (furious)

I’m pretty sure that the most insidious organization on the face of the Earth is the United States Postal Service. In general, the quality of service in this country is on the decline—but the Postal Service is the undisputed King of disservice. When I first started working I was a clerk at Walgreens. If I ever ignored a customer, argued with a customer, flat-out refused to help a customer…I’d have been fired (like the guy who rode one of those Razor flip-scooters through the Pharmacy Drive-Thru).

People who work at the Post Office seem to not be too worried about their jobs. I’m not sure what they tell these people when they’re hired, but I imagine it’s something along the lines of: “Congratulations! You can’t EVER be fired…go nuts!”

Like retail stores, some Post Offices are worse than others…and sadly the area the Post Office is located does seem to correlate with how crappy you will be treated. Poorer neighborhoods have the worst Post Offices. Growing up in the “digital age,” I had little use for the Post Office…until I moved to St. Louis to attend college. I lived on Campus and soon discovered that there are some things you just can’t email. The Post Office nearest the dorms I lived in was in a pretty crappy part of town. Luckily for me it was manned by some of the most racist people I’ve ever met.

I was ignored. People cut in-front of me (and no one said anything). I was berated once for using the wrong label/Postal envelope combination. There were never any pens in the waiting area—so you couldn’t fill out your stupid postal forms or envelopes. Once a Postal Employee made me sign my debit card before I could pay (I don’t sign my debit card, I write “SEE ID” on the back in red Sharpie, because I want to be carded in case someone ever steals my wallet). Whenever I had my arms full of packages or envelopes, it seemed like all but one window would suddenly close.

This is probably the part of bureaucracy I loath the most—four people behind the counter, eight people waiting in line, and only ONE person with an open window. I hate this at the bank, the DMV, the gas station, and especially the Post Office.

One day I snapped. One day I had enough.

What happened was a perfect storm of crap. I went to the Post Office to mail some paperback books for an online book swapping club that Leah and I use to save money on books. I had a small stack of pre-wrapped paperbacks in my hand. The second I walked in I took a number. The woman behind the counter saw me and sneered. She immediately quit using the number system, probably to discourage me. Soon it was a crazy free-for-all. After three people who arrived after I me had made their way up to the window, I was finally able to approach.

“Can I help you?” she asked in that surly, bitchy way that really says “Fuck off, I don’t want to help you.”

I told her that I wanted to ship my books, and she began to lazily drag the books across her scanning device. Each book was slowly keyed into her system. This whole visit had taken thirty minutes of my time. Not an eternity, but way longer than it should have. But I was feeling okay because I was about to be done. I was about to be free!

And then the moment came to pay.

I was given a total and I took out my debit card and swiped it on the credit machine at the end of the counter.

Nothing happened.

I looked up and the woman behind the counter arched a thickly penciled eyebrow and smirked.

“It’s broken. We can’t do debit or credit right now.”

“Are you serious?”

She nodded.

I sighed, “Ugh. What am I supposed to do? I don’t have any cash.”

“You can go across the street…I think they have an ATM.”

I had waited for over twenty minutes for nothing. Why didn’t they put up a sign? Why didn’t they let people know that they had to use Cash or check only today? I was livid. You know the saying “I was seeing red”? Well I was seeing it…and boy…was it red.

People love to tell me about my “anger problem.” Well you know what? I have a problem—it’s a “people-can’t-help-but piss-me-off” problem if you want to know the truth. I can handle some crazy shit. I know people don’t think that I can, but I can list examples. Like the time someone plowed into my car at work. I was totally cool. I didn’t yell and I wasn’t mad. It was out of my control. It happened, why get upset?

People can cut in front of me in the Post Office. They can sneer at me. They can make me wait 30 minutes to spend $15. They can even tell me (after the fact) that their debit machine is broken. My weakness is that after swallowing so many bites of the world’s shit-sandwich, I spit throw it back up.

I didn’t yell at the woman (though I did let her know I was upset). Instead, I swore right then and there to NEVER go back into that Post Office again (and I haven’t). I also got into my car and called Leah.

“Leah! I’m so pissed! I’m joining a fucking militia,” I spat at her.

Leah was clearly confused as to what I was talking about.

“The Government! They need to be brought down! The Post Office is a fucking joke!”

I truly believe that everyone is super-right wing whenever the chips are down…I mean really down. When the shit hits the fan, we’re not John Kerry.

We’re not even George W. Bush.

We are Dick Cheney. And we are going to bomb your fucking desert. We are going to shoot our hunting buddies head ALL THE WAY OFF.

I never did join that militia, and I never “took down the government,” though someone should probably get around to doing that…if for no other reason—than to close all those worthless Post Offices.

A Lesson In Hate: The California Pizza Kitchen Incident

Growing up white, and in the suburbs, one tends to miss out on a few things. Like racism and discrimination. In school you learn about Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, but these topics are presented in a “Long Time Ago, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away…” type narrative that misleads the young and impressionable into thinking that ethnic and religious groups now blend seamlessly together.

I think there were four of five black kids in my High School class. I don’t know the exact figures, but it was abysmally low. So much for desegregation. Once I started working and went off to college I met all sorts of people (read: “Not Whitey”). People with diverse backgrounds that all told me the same thing—shit in this country hasn’t changed very much since Dr. King first had his famous “dream.”

As a young person (who looks a bit like a drug mule), I have faced some…shall we say “extra scrutiny” in shopping malls and at the airport. But nothing like some of the stories I’ve been told by friends not lucky enough to be born “white.” Recently I was chatting with a guy who told me about how he caught a prospective employer throwing away his application TWO SECONDS AFTER HE TURNED IT IN.

What happened was, he turned it to a secretary then left—on his way to his car he thought of something he wanted to add to application. So he goes inside and asks for his application back. The lady says she can’t find it, which is strange because he just gave it to her. So he goes and sits down in the lobby, and while he nervously staring at his shoes—he sees his application TORN IN HALF sitting atop the secretary’s trashcan.

If this happened to me I’d think “Gee, they must really not like the looks of me,” it’s different when you’re black. Whereas I would have gotten really pissed, this guy just shrugged and took it in stride—he said he was “used to it.” To me that’s the worst part of the story. Whereas I would have been filled with rage, this poor guy just shrugged and took it in stride—because it was normal for him.

I think that blatant sort of discrimination/racism is tough to fight—but what’s tougher is the more passive forms of hate. There is application-ripping, bed-sheet-wearing hate…but there is also a more nefarious, subtle bit of hate. Hate/hate-speech is ingrained in American life and can sometimes slip past even the most sensitive liberal-hippies.

In High School the “cool” way to put a person, idea, or thing down was to call it “gay.” It got to the point where even I was saying it. Without even thinking about it I would proclaim my hatred for Geometry by saying, “Geometry is gay.”

No. Geometry is fucking difficult, boring, and utterly useless to me…but it’s not going around sleeping with like-sexed schools of math. Does that even make any sense? No, no it does not. You can’t even try to use reason on the sentence “Geometry is gay.” It defies reason.

So I’ve lived a charmed life being the same color as a loaf of Wonder Bread. But as I grew older and began mixing with other types of people I witnessed a few instances of discrimination.

I speak of course about the infamous “California Pizza Kitchen Incident.”

My wife Leah is white like me, but unlike me she’s Jewish. Before meeting her, all I knew about Jews I gleaned from Jerry Seinfeld and SHINDLER’S LIST. The only Jewish person I’d ever really met was this mousy-girl that sat adjacent to me in a community college composition class. Leah being Jewish didn’t and does not bother me. But it has opened up my eyes to a few things…

“The California Pizza Kitchen Incident”

One time, Leah and I went to California Pizza Kitchen—which by the way is a fucking awful pizza place. I don’t want to totally derail myself here, but I feel like I need to let the world know that though his story occurred at California Pizza Kitchen, I think it’s terrible and I don’t normally eat there.

Interlude: California Pizza Kitchen Sucks

My reasoning is this: Pizza is an eastern thing. Chicago. New York. Those places are “back East,” where Pizza SHOULD come from. The only way that California is “back East” is if you somehow circumnavigate the globe, so that by going East you end up going West…

Look, the Earth is round. I wish I could explain all that better…but I fucking flunked geometry (twice) so I have only a rudimentary understanding of globes and such. Anyway, California isn’t known for FANTASTIC piazza.

California Pizza Kitchen also sucks because it’s one of those restaurants that try to take a “low-brow” or “everyman” food item and make it “high-brow” and a “pinkies-out” kind of dinning experience. Look, when I eat pizza, I want either an animatronic bear (singing about how good the pizza is) OR I want paper napkins. CPK has neither of these things—therefore it sucks.

End of Interlude

So Leah drags me to this place, and everything is going as good as it can go (in a pizza place with no singing bear or paper napkins), when we finish our meal and we get the check. Like most young people, Leah pays with a debit card. Our waiter, a young twenty-something who looks like he stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue (not that I look at those), has been polite and done a decent enough job waiting on us.

After he runs Leah’s debit card he gives her that little leather booklet-thing they give you in fancy (“pinkies-out”) restaurants that holds the credit slip. She opens it and asks for a pen (so she can finish paying).

Our waiter reaches into his kangaroo apron/pouch and pulls out a pen and hands it to her says (of the pen):

“Sure, here you go…just don’t Jew it.”

Then he turns and walks away.

Leah looks at me and I look at Leah. A few seconds tick by, then we both kinda ask each other at the same time—“Did he just say what I think he just said?”

As a gentile, I didn’t even fucking understand what that was supposed to me. My immediate reaction wasn’t so much “I want to punch this guy’s lights out,” so much as ask him what he hell he meant by that. Was he referring to her tipping?

Leah didn’t think so; she thought he meant stealing his pen.

Not used to these hurtful/embarrassing situations, I looked to Leah for what to do. She decided to leave a nasty note on the receipt. What else could we do? It wasn’t like we were going to walk up to they guy and ask what he meant by his anti-Semitic slur. I mean, I couldn’t ask a question like that. Not without tearing out his throat with my bare hands.

I’m just not built that way.

So we left a note (and I’m sure Leah tipped him, though it was a really small tip).

End of "The California Pizza Kitchen Incident"

The weird part was, a few days (weeks?) later this douche-bag contacted Leah on Facebook and tried to apologize (which tells me he probably didn’t mean anything by it). He tried to pass his comments off as a misunderstanding, and that he just didn’t want her to steal his pen.

This guy went to Fontbonne University (a school out here in St. Louis) and his Facebook page made me wish I had punched him. Of course he had SHINDLER’S LIST down as one of his favorite movies…which Leah thinks he added to appear like less of a d-bag.

What’s messed up is, this guy might have just been honestly misheard by Leah and myself. Maybe he didn’t say “Jew” maybe he said something else. Maybe this guy truly does LOVE JEWS and was just using “jew” in a pejorative fashion in the same way that I used to use “gay” in High School.

The sad part is, we just don’t know.

We all have these negative attitudes and prejudices inside us—and I think one of the lasting legacy’s of hate is that people see it sometimes when it might not actually be there.