Waiting Room Hell

 

There’s a Chevy dealership 8-9 miles north from where I live, a quick hop on the expressway ramp within three minutes of my house and I’m there in no time at all. I’ve bought and sold three vehicles there over the past 18 years and I’ve gotten all our service work there as well. The place is in the middle nowhere but in between several small towns and their waiting room is usually full of friendly, country people who talk to each other---no heads buried in their phones. 

Until a few years ago, they had young female service manager who really knew her stuff. My husband adored her and no wonder. She looked like Pete Pan, talked diagnostics and was one of the few people in our world who actually understood how to interact with someone who lost their speech due to a stroke. One time I asked her how she got interested in working on cars and trucks and she said her mom was a single mom who drove cars that were always breaking down so she got books from the library to study what was wrong with them. By the time she was 10-12 she was changing spark plugs and air filters which eventually led her to getting a degree in automotive technology and repair. I’ve loved that service center. There's always a good back story to glean from someone.

I had to go up there this week for an oil change and tire rotation and when the newish service guy came out to the waiting room to get an estimate approved for a few other Mickey Mouse things that needed doing he said he’d measured the tread depth on my tires and I needed a new set to the tune of $667. I laughed and said, “Are you telling me I came in here for an oil change and you want me to leave with a new set of tires?” “Pretty much,” he answered. “How long is all this going to take?” I asked him. I had another appointment to get to so I had him schedule the tires for another day. I think it shocked him with how easy his sales pitch went but what he didn’t know is that getting new tires was on my list of things to do before I move. My money will be much tighter afterward and I figure they’ll be the last tires I’ll ever have to buy. He also didn’t know that back in my heydays I questioned the depth of tire treads on some of the trucks my husband owned so often that he bought me my very own tread depth checker. I kept it on my key chained and with nine pickup trucks, 3 front-end loaders, a street sweeper and a Corvette it became a joke that whenever we’d be near one of those vehicles I’d be checking out the tires. The joke was on me, though, because I officially became the person who got sent down to the tire place to wait when tires needed replacing.

I’m back from my walk down Memory Lane and let me tell you my recent wait at the dealership service center was not the pleasant experience I usual have in the place. It started out with me and another woman in the room but soon after I sat down a man showed up and announced that he wasn’t going to sit by me because I was wearing a mask and he didn’t believe in them. They are still state-mandated in my state but I didn’t say a word. I just got my Kindle out, pretending I didn’t hear what he said. The other woman, however said, "You're talking my language."

That began my hour spent in Conversation Hell as the two of them talked hardcore Trumpism---the “stolen” election and how he'll be back in the White House, illegal immigrants, how Black Lives Matter caused more violence than "what happened at the capital", the recent mass shootings and how the Democrats are staging them to take their guns away. There wasn’t a topic/conspiracy they didn’t cover. They are both anti-vaccines and she said, "only old people die from the virus anyway." Hello! I thought, I'm old and I can hear you over the six feet that separates our chairs! He told the woman his brother's whole family is sick with "they say its Covid" but he thought it was the common flu and the doctors were lying because "they get $2,000 every time they write that on a medical chart." 'They' are over-achievers these 'they' people, I was thinking. 'They' also put illegal immigrants up in $100 a night hotel rooms. I just kept silent, no way was I wadding in their dirty pool. Even when the guy said he has a hidden bunker with over 3,000 rounds of ammo, 28 guns and enough food to last him two months for the civil war that’s coming, I just sat there re-reading the same page over and over again on my Kindle. Not saying a word, not making eye contact.

After the woman left the man says to me, “I hope we didn’t bother you” and I didn’t even lower my Kindle when I replied, “Nothing I haven’t heard before and I don’t need to hear it again.” “Sorry,” he replies. Finally I looked at him, really looked into his eyes and said in a cheerful voice I didn't feel inside, “No need to apologize it’s a free country. You get to say whatever you want and I get to disagree with every single thing you just said in here.” The look on his face was almost funny, like the proverbial, frozen-faced deer caught in your headlights. He got up and without another word he wandered into the new car showroom. Not man enough to be in the presence of a 'they' person I presumed.

As I was driving home I knew I shouldn’t have said what I said. People as delusional as Mr. Hidden Bunker could have turned violent and he was carrying a handgun. He was a regular gold mine of information---where he lived, his name, where he worked, how much money he has hidden on his property because 'they' are going to close all the banks, you know. If I have been an FBI agent, that guy would have gone on 'watch list' and as much as he talked, I'll bet he's already on one. When I go back for the tires I hope I'll be waiting with nicer people. It's the last time I'll be going there because I'll have to find something closer for car service after I move. The last-time-I-be-doing-this experiences are adding up fast. ©

Power Outages and Standing up for Truth

I hate power outages. I especially hate them at night in the wintertime but we had one the day the House of Representatives voted to impeach the president. Again. It started at twilight giving me just enough time to gather the six solar lights that normally line up along the walk to my front door and I staged them to light up a path from my master bath through the bedroom and living room to the kitchen. This time of the year they don’t get enough sun to keep them lit more than a couple of hours after dark but those couple of hours saved me using up the battery on my camping lantern. A half hour into the outage I got a voice mail and text on my cell phone and robocall on my landline from the power company estimating how long the outage would last. Three hours they said, but that turned out not to be true. It lasted five. Apparently after the last outage I went into over-killed signing up for these alerts. I ended up getting a total of twelve updates which is more action than my phones have seen since Christmas.

I didn’t have an unread books downloaded on my Kindle so I spent most of the outage reading a book I’ve read twice before. It’s a good book, so I didn’t mind. In fact, knowing how it was going to end seemed comforting, given the political climate we’re in---a counter balance to that feeling of waiting for the other shoe to fall and not knowing if anyone will be there to catch it and return it or if that person will use it as a weapon. A poor analogy for the chaos of the January 6^th insurrection and holding my breath hoping we don’t see a repeat on the 20^th but no one ever accused me of being the sharpest pencil sitting in the coffee cup.

Two hours into the outage it was getting cool in the house so I managed to wrestle a sweater on to the dog. He hates wearing stuff, and apparently it wasn’t quite cold enough inside for him to appreciate the garment because he alternated between asking to go outside the front door and the back door. I didn’t dare take a chance that he didn’t have a bowel or bladder issue so I’d roll up the sweater to protect it from getting christened with pee, let him out and in. Finally, I got the hint that he didn’t really need anything other than to cool off, so I wrestled the sweater back off him and he settled down.

The day after the outage I found a message on my phone that came during the outage from the son-I-wish-I-had. He started the message out, “I’m calling from a Democrat run concentration camp, but I don’t want to talk about politics. I want to know if you want to start working on some things that needs doing to get your house ready to list.” It saddens me and makes me feel like I’ll be walking on eggs where Tim’s concerned for the first time in the 50 years we've known each other. I hate that he's been indoctrinated into Trumpism and far-right spin.

Since the insurrection at the Capital Tim's been Facebook posting like crazy which, in itself is out of character. His posts have all been focused on the evils of Socialism and social media censoring the president, and “there needs to be an investigation on why that 'poor woman' was shot through a locked door.” He got a lot of 'likes' and amen like-comments from his posts and no push back…until I came along. About the woman I wrote: “Did you see the video leading up to the shooting at the Capital? The woman was shot while climbing through the window in of the door to the Speaker's Lobby after the mob had broken through the glass. Totally justified.” And then I added a link to the graphic video. 

On one of his censorship posts I pointed out that the 1^st amendment only protects free speech from the government making laws against it and he posted back, “Are you okay with that?” So I replied: “My opinion doesn't matter. PRIVATE companies have a right to apply any rules they want about the content they allow or not allow. For example, I was a monitor on a large stroke support site for nearly five years and we had a rule that people couldn't post about wanting to commit suicide. It was my job to remove those posts and contact their local police department for a wellness check if I thought they were serious. We had a five step procedure to make that judgement call. If we had let those suicide posts stand others could come along and encourage them to do it and that would have made the site legally liable. What Facebook and others sites are doing is no different. Again the constitution only protects us against the GOVERNMENT restricting free speech. The president has a fully staffed press room near the Oval Office where reporters are waiting 24/7/365 and he can get on all the networks within a few minutes if he wants to.”

No one gave either of my comments a ‘like’ or replied in any way which I consider progress since no one called me brain-washed, stupid or delusional either. My comments effectively ended the threads. Tim lives in a Red Bubble of friends, neighbors, church members and family and all his recent political posts are re-posts from far-right conspiracy websites. I don’t want to lose his friendship over Trump (and I don’t think I will) but if there was ever a time when we need to have the courage to stand up for facts and the Truth, it’s now! Our silence gives Thump's supporters fuel to keep spreading misinformation and those lies are like a cancer that is killing our Democracy. ©

Battle Scars and Bloody Noses

Spoiler Alert: If you are a Trump supporter you may want to stop reading here. If you don't want to read a political post, please skip this one and come back on Saturday.

Wikipedia says that Brianna Wiest, the author of the meme up above is a twenty-eight year old "American writer and poet. She is best known for her prolific work on emotional intelligence. Her published works include the books 101 Essays to Change the Way You Think, The Truth About Everything, and The Human Element…”

I snatched the meme off Facebook and it spoke to me at a time when I was in a grumpy mood and dealing with a wee bit of depression that led me down a path I knew better than to set foot on, but I did it anyway. Yup, I engaged in an off-again, on-again all day Facebook debate with me on one side and five Trump supporters on the other side and by the end of the day we’d racked up over fifty comments back and forth. I was on a debate team in college, a second stringer, but I learned a lot, loved the process and the rules of engagement and for 3-4 years I was also a message board administrator on a website where I was in charge of giving members time-outs when angry exchanges got too hot and posting rules were broken. I debate fair and square and keep my cool as I did this time on Facebook. But Facebook doesn’t give time-outs and Trump supporters don’t care if they take their fights into the gutter with name calling and belittling those with opposing viewpoints and for that reason I rarely engage in political discussions on Facebook. That's to say I went into this slug-fest with my eyes wide open knowing I would become a pseudo punching bag but that doesn’t take the sting out of getting a bloody nose.

“Your Anger? It’s Telling You Where You Feel Powerless.” Oh, yes, Brianna, my anger is telling me I’m totally frustrated with the state of our nation and feeling as powerless as a dead kitten. We have a president who is incapable of empathy and compassion. He's incapable of bringing two sides of people together whether we're talking blacks and whites, Democrats and Republics, radicals and pacifists. He’s incapable of dealing with the Covid-19 epidemic or any other crisis that might come along.

“Your anxiety? It’s telling you that something in your life is off balance.” Oh, yes, Brianna, I am without words to express the sadness, fear and hopelessness I feel over what is going on in our nation right now. As if the pandemic wasn’t bad enough, now we have Trump sending unidentified troops into Portland uninvited and unwanted by the state or city governments. "Tyranny creeps up on a nation and we’re witnessing its beginning here and now," according to Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University who in 2017 wrote: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. “Be wary of paramilitaries, "he said in an interview this week. "In 2017 the idea of unidentified agents in camouflage snatching leftists off the streets without warrants might have seemed like a febrile Resistance fantasy, Now it’s happening."

“Your fear? It’s telling you what you care about.” Oh, yes, Brianna, I care about this country, about its future and I fear that Trump is going to get reelected or if he doesn't, he'll weaken our democracy by not giving us a peaceful transition of power for the first time in our history. Part of the debate I took part in today was about voter suppression which, of course, no one but me thought it was a problem for people of color but voting by mail in their minds was full of run-away abuse---setting the table for claims of a rigged election if Trump loses. It came up because we’d been on the topic of the Black Lives Matters. Trump supporters do not distinguish between protesters and rioters and, according to them, just saying “black lives matter” is racist. I brought up the parable of the shepherd who has 100 sheep and one goes missing. When the shepherd leaves the 99 to go looking for the lost sheep, the 99 sheep cry, "But what about us, don't we matter?" And the shepherd says, "Of course you matter but you're not ones in danger. The one is." I read that in a sermon delivered by a Catholic Priest who was explaining to his congregation why the church supports the Black Lives Matter Movement. I hope his telling of the parable got a better reception than mine did.

“Your apathy? It’s telling you where you’re overextended and burnt out.” Yes, Brianna, that sentence really spoke to me because I haven't done anything but the bare necessity of living for over a week, checked out on life, which I’m guessing is why I needed a good slug-fest today to make me check back in and feel like I was adding something to the pool besides the pee others were leaving. We have a do-or-die election coming up and that should challenge us all to help by calling out outright lies within our realms of existence. When I saw the nasty meme about Black Lives Matter that started the whole debate thread I just had to put on my bathing suit and wade into the muddy water.

“Your feelings aren’t random, they are messengers. And if you want to get anywhere, you need to be able to let them speak to you, and tell you what you really need.” Okay, Brianna, I let my feelings hang out here on my blog and I want to thank you for this ‘conversation.’ You are a breath of fresh air after my day of collecting battle scars and a bloody nose. ©

NOTE: The two memes in this post were shared on my great-niece's Facebook page. It's what she does. Sometimes its surreal to see them show up alternating with the hate filled, misinformation posts from the Trump supporters on my husband's side of the family. Another prolific poster always adds beautiful photos of enchanting cottages into the mix I see on my Facebook feed, and another shares recipes. I've been on a kick lately of posting humorous kitten memes. My favorite posts are photos of the youngest little people in my family. That's Facebook---a microcosm of the world at large. The good, bad and the ugly. True or not, I like to think of myself as a student of human nature which is why I don't unfriend the relatives who irritate the living stuffing out of me...just in case you were about to suggest that I do so.