Surreal Situation in U.S. Post Office
March 14th, 2012My dad went to his local post office to mail me some CDs that I had forgotten to pack when I left the U.S. back in 2006. He said that a bunch of other “old farts” in the post office were also sending packages to their children and grandchildren who were living overseas.
He overhead an elderly woman complaining about how she couldn’t send something or other to Australia for $2. Then the guy next to her said he couldn’t believe how much it cost to send stuff to his daughter in Costa Rica.
“My son is in Australia, too,” said the guy in front of my dad.
“Mine is in New Zealand,” said my dad.
Someone else had a daughter in France and another had a son in Germany.
A group formed outside and they started taking out pictures of their grandchildren from purses and wallets to share around.
“Kevin, I’ve been going to that post office for damn near fifty years and I’ve never seen anything like that before. In my day, if a guy talked about wanting to leave America to find a better deal, he would have gotten his ass kicked.”
“Yeah, dad, love it or leave it, eh?” which actually means, “Oh for f*ck’s sake, here we go again.”
“I don’t know what happened to this country.”
I could have said, “Turning off Fox news and that stream of bullshit that comes out your AM radio all day and night would be a good idea,” but having had conversations like that hundreds of times before, I changed the subject and talked about what his grandsons have been up to, how many lamb chops Becky has to cook to keep up with their appetites and how we borrowed some clucky bantam hens to hatch some chicks for us, etc.
My dad is the type of person who always thinks tomorrow is going to be better than today, regardless of the fact that the preponderance of data suggests otherwise. But that gathering at the post office rattled him a bit. I could sort of hear the gears in his head turning as he tried to work through it: If America is the best country in the world, why was I just talking with a group of strangers about how all of our kids split?
“Maybe they’ll get a war going after the next election,” he offered hopefully.
“You mean, another war. There are four or five concurrent wars underway right now.”
Silence.
“Ok, later, dad.”
Kevin,
Is your father from the ‘silent’ generation?
This sounds like the exact same reaction that
my dad would have. Hope this helps him
come to grip what is really happening here.
Yeah, he’s almost 80.
My Dad’s the same way; 73 years old, Marine Corps veteran, union retiree, and won’t hear anything against the good ol’ USA. (Think Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.) We talk politics occasionally, and agree on most current issues, but the very idea that any other country is a better place to live is anathema. He holds the common misconception that any kind of socialism equals communism and that capitalism is the only system that accommodates human nature. Double standards abound in his Humphrey Democrat worldview, but somehow he doesn’t share my cognitive dissonance. Of course, he refuses to get a computer, won’t go near the internet, and gets all his news out of the local paper and broadcast television. It’s like his buffer filled up in about 1976, and he never even considered any new ideas after that. Sometimes I envy the comfy bubble he lives in, and find myself hoping that nothing happens to disrupt his pension and social security. But they are a dying breed, this last generation to enjoy the promises of the original American Dream: steady, secure blue-collar employment with the same company for 30-some years, a living wage, home ownership, and a safe, secure retirement. They played by the rules, and the system didn’t let them down. How long did that last in this country? Two generations? Three at most? Now it’s over, and we have to pick up the pieces.
@GaryC
Same deal with my dad, almost 80 like Kevin’s. Although he has a computer, only looks at the “approved” sites.
@Kevin
Very similar fault lines as with you and your dad. Mine can’t imagine psychological warfare, false flag events. “We’d never do that!” He really believes we need to stay in Iraq to keep the Iraqis from killing each other. I tell him we foment the internal conflicts with phony bombings but he is not capable of imagining real war I guess.I try to get the man to imagine what our own countrymen would do if invaded by a more powerful enemy, and how we would react to our own people cooperating with the enemy. I know in his heart he can see these things are true, but the pain of reconstructing his view of the world is too much for him this late in the game. The realization came after 9-11 for me although I always knew something was wrong, once I began looking at the evidence I could no longer believe the old lies, and I never looked at anything the same again. It’s painful and the old guys would rather take their comfortable world to the grave with them.Thanks for this site, it has opened my eyes to a lot. Better the painful truth than a comfortable lie.
My dad was born in late 1924, but he had an attitude of always trying to stay young (which got him hurt physically sometimes). He wanted on the internet badly, so I got him there, and he spent hours on it like us youngsters. He took to alternative news, conspiracies, and false-flags like a champ, but I would still notice the old ways in him, such as he thought FDR was the greatest thing in the world. In his world view this was true because he saw FDR create the welfare state that helped everyone out of the depression. I could see that of course he would think that because of what he saw going on around him at that time. He just didn’t realize (or want to) that FDR was mortgaging the future. This all showed me that it is very hard to get someone to change their view of something that is very personal to them.
My mother was/(wanted to be) completely oblivious, wanting to believe in all the universal myths. She would say “oh, but the government is just all of us put together.”
Awesome post K.
I’m forwarding it to my family.
I have learned to keep the same reaction as you. Change the subject, they are hopeless. We would be delusional like them to think after all the time we’ve put in to convince them anything will change. No, we’ve got to face that sorry reality and move on.
BTW that Swiss Katadyn kicks butt, got it through Nitro Pak on sale a while ago.
We’re headed out, too, very soon.
Our next location may or may not be where we choose to put down roots, but I already knew this journey might take more than one hop.
I know I’ve read an essay before about how the length of human lifespan frames how we see history and imagine the constancy of a situation. If there’s any truth to the notion, I suspect it applies here.
Within our parents’ and grandparents’ lifetimes, information flowed more slowly and the scope of an individual’s knowledge about the world was geographically smaller. Because of that, it was easier to cling to the notion that wherever you were was, if not the best place on earth, at least a really good one. And some level of that belief is probably good for the human psyche. Feeling positive about where you live makes feeling good about life much easier.
I can understand why people of Kevin’s father’s generation – which is that of my parents as well – resist changing their perspectives on their home country. What will it gain them at this point? It must be obvious, even if they don’t think about it, that any admission of weakness in the viewpoint is a slippery slope.
If we aren’t the greatest nation now (whatever that means), were we ever? If the wars we’re fighting overseas now aren’t just or right, what about earlier wars? If we admit that we have agents in other countries doing things we would consider terrorism or acts of war in our own, what about the claims of people all throughout latin america regarding the CIA and the last 40 years? If we’ve mistreated our own people under the aegis of national desire many times before, what’s to say we aren’t doing so now and that we won’t do so again?
The fact is that our national self-worth is founded on a healthy dose of brittle self-delusion. That’s part of what makes it dangerous, what makes the fear of its loss such an easy lever to apply in support of policy. To hold to the official view of our country, we must believe that which is patently absurd, and which an ever-growing body of evidence contradicts. In the light of the obvious failure of our national identity, the denials and the public finger-pointing seem ever more shrill and less sincere.
An exodus from US is especially hard to take in light of this hyperbolic notion of national importance. If we are a ‘chosen country’ (for those with a conservative christian bent), or merely ‘the best place in the world’, then why would someone leave? Either they must be crazy (or my perspective on my own country must be wrong).
This vision of the USA as the summit of culture and human development is inextricably intertwined with its sense of self-importance and place as arbiter of taste, judge of morals, and enforcer of laws in the greater world.
We’re number one, therefore it’s only right that you do as we say, because you wish you lived here, and it’s our duty to bring the Peace, the Light, and the KFC Double Down to all God’s children.
Doing my best to ‘leave it’.
zeke