Food for thought

Hi art lovers, okay, I'm already pretty darn fed up. This is not about art but the art of standing up.

I was at the grocery store today checking out and the registers froze. So I had to wait. All the customers had to wait. The cashier walked away, turns out to get help, without the good manners of letting us know what was going on. My transaction was finished. My groceries were in my handy, green, recycled bags and my check was in the machine. I was all done. But... I had to wait. Why? Wasn't I the costumer? Had I done something wrong? Then I remembered a phrase my first boss taught me, "The customer always comes first" ... so why did I have to wait for the register to get its repair before I could go home and cook the meal for the family that was sitting in my green earth bags defrosting? Why didn't the checkout clerk just say, "Ms. Owens, your check is good, go ahead and go home"? After all I'm at that store every single day! It was so crazy watching all these people try and keep it together for fear of acting without their manners, all the while the cashier apparently didn't give a rip about anything but her job.

Dinner done and family fed, I watched the news. I saw a report about the cash-for-clunkers deal that a lot of car buyers took advantage of. The million dollar advertising champaign said to bring in your clunker for cash toward a new car. Man, what a deal, right? Hoards of humanity took them up on their offer. After all it was a million dollar ad champaign, surly its a great deal! Wonder how the auto dealers managed to pay for all that advertising?

The reporter was interviewing a woman who had cashed in on the deal. So the deal is: The customer gets a new car at a great discount. Then the auto dealers get the cash from the government, for the clunkers they collect. This is where it gets tricky, it's the government who encouraged this cash-for-clunkers deal. It's the government who said they would pay the dealers to get the gas hogs off the road as a shinning example of the new change to make us a more efficient, greener, cleaner, America.... and of course to stimulate us enough to turn around the economy. Am I wrong?

Looks like the government is not holding up to their end of the bargain. The reporter said the dealers are not getting the money from the government in a timely fashion and they are stuck with clunkers. The profit they gave up in the deal is hurting their bottom line. The car dealers are now in trouble, (again) and they want the cars they sold back! So this dealer is telling his the buyers to bring back their cars!! Remember, the government owns a lot of the car industry now.

The woman talking to the camera in the news tonight was confused and waiting, trying to decided whether she should give her car back, even though the she owns it out right. It's officially hers on paper. Her name on the contract, the car in her garage. I thought, what good manners she has, so calm and trusting, that everything will turn out alright.

So, this is a warning humans. The government is not, and will not, hold up their part of the bargain. They cant... they are out of the money they never had! After all the CEOs need their bonuses, because they are so special at what they do.

The governmental cogs turn slowly and the government will roll along at its governmental pace as it always has. This will not change. The various government offices need there vacations and their time off.

What is changing? The change is going to happen on our end... not the governments. It must roll along on its bureaucratic wheels at a pace of a government employee on his government pay.

I must roll with it and I must wait. I have good manners.

And so it will be. We will wait. We will wait for our stimulus plan to kick in. We, (businesses) will wait for our cash incentive deals to get paid. We, (consumers) will wait for our health care. We will wait for a hospital bed. We will wait for housing to turn around. Our seniors will wait for medications or they'll just have to wait to die.

Eventually we will wait for our food in long lines. No more frozen register problems. Finally, we will wait and wait and then realize our freedoms defrosted and we threw them out with all our hopes for change. The customer will comes last.

What do we get in return? ... Guess we will wait and see.

I look at people on the highway in the midst of their road rage, flipping others off for driving to slow, and wonder how they will do waiting for government food. Its gonna be interesting.

By the way, I got up the courage and walked out of that grocery store today... without my receipt. It felt great. I felt free.