Too much to ask

My mother is sick with the flu (after getting the H1N1 vaccine some weeks ago–and I thought H1N1 was the only flu going around this year), so I took some stuff to the Graton post office for her.

It was closed. For lunch.

Now I understand the one man running the Graton Post Office needs to take a lunch. And he needs Saturdays off. But eccentric hours disrespect my time. The fact I’m unemployed is irrelevant. It is still disrespect. So I was pissed. In disgust, I walked back to my truck and drove to the Sebastopol Post Office, checked my mail at the mail box place across the street, and got most of my mother’s postal errands done. But I was still fuming while I was driving there.

Because with all the unemployment in this country and all the lying that’s embedded in the statistics to make the economy seem better than it is, the Postal Service can’t hire a second person to man the Graton Post Office and keep it open regular hours. Instead, my stepsister in Stockton, a single mother working for the Postal Service worries about her job. The Postal Service is cutting back, she says, closing branch offices and reducing staff. She’ll probably be okay because she has enough seniority.

Obama’s been trying to spur hiring in the private sector with massive infrastructure projects. It hasn’t worked. And the job creation statistics from his stimulus package are flawed. The stimulus package is just one more example of Obama’s fine-sounding promises that are somehow supposed to substitute for the cruel reality of his deeds.

Now, I know that asking Obama to do actually something real to help people, that is other than bailing out the military-industrial complex; bailing out the health insurance industry; bailing out the banks; and reinforcing the Bush regime of secrecy, torture, and domestic spying is unreasonable. Something about the “politics of the possible,” governing being different from campaigning, corruption compromise being a sign of maturity, and all that.

There are a lot of working class people working for the Postal Service. If Obama can’t do any good, the least he can do is to avoid doing harm. But looking at what he’s doing in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, I guess even that’s too much to ask.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.