USA – Get Out of Our Way

We Americans always seem to be in a hurry.  It’s on the highways with someone who thinks they’re a lower level James Bond coming flying by me, weaving from lane to lane.   Looking for divine retribution, I hope to see them in a ditch, unhurt but ego bruised a few miles down the road.  I even saw this unwelcome impatience in a department store in Florida among older people as they went up and down the aisles like snow-plows, looks of grim annoyance on their faces that said clearly, “I earned this. In thirty years, you can push people out of the way too.”  

We see regularly this “my time is more important than anyone else’s, and therefore I’m entitled to barge ahead.”  Even murder suspects on “Law and Order” will tell the police, “I don’t have time for this.”  As if the detectives will respond, “sure, get yourself a latte and check your emails  – this killing can wait.” I heard an attendant at a Disney park once say with a hint of sarcasm a few years ago, “push and shove – it’s the American Way.”   I find it curious that those who have bulldozed their way into a theater, those that had to be first in, proceed to park their fannies in the end seats, forcing others to climb over them to get at available seats in the middle of the row.

Americans are not a patient people, and we’ve proven that time and again. It seems to have started with the War of Independence.  Apparently, only George Washington and John Adams knew it would take years to separate from Britain.  The Continental Congress was of the opinion that hostilities could be wrapped up in a few weeks, six months maybe if the carts got bogged down.  The same mentality set in at the time of the Civil War – one or two quick skirmishes, and we’ll go on as if nothing happened.  Almost nobody except the army suppliers thought it would drag on for years.  When former President George W. Bush declared, “Mission Accomplished”, Americans everywhere thought, “well that’s it then – the Middle East should be fine now.  Once again, America to the rescue.”  Not quite.  Maybe we think that because weapons are bigger, faster, and way more destructive, conflicts can “hurry up”. When our government takes some form of economic corrective action, we like to give it about two weeks to fully work.  If it doesn’t happen quickly, we get frustrated and want to go in a different direction, and “hop to it”.   When our financial institutions do risky things and cause a meltdown, we analyze the problem, identify the causes and the culprits, and put stern measures in place to make sure that doesn’t happen again.  And then, just a few years or an election cycle later, we remove those measures so the same problems will problems again.  Somehow, the art of “connecting the dots” eludes us in our impatience.

Much of this national lack of patience drives our culture.  Phones with cords attached  – way too limiting, so we made them cordless so we could do other stuff while chatting – eating breakfast, opening mail, trimming toenails. The internet has allowed us to bypass many things that were previously time-consuming.  Depositing into our bank accounts, for example – way too much time and effort.  Just take a picture of the check and send it to the bank, because going to the drive-up window consumed too many precious life moments, as did waiting in line for the next teller.  Seriously, about the only people using tellers any more are holding a gun, and they’re standing in line because they don’t know how to hack.  Bank robbers are so nineteenth century.  Can anyone over 40 remember a time when taking a picture on a phone was like Star Trek technology?  We order coffee on our phones, using “call ahead” because waiting for those that came in ahead of us is ridiculous.  We’ve developed a whole new language – texting – because actual words are really too long and cumbersome.   I’m most likely the slowest “texter” in the Western World because I use complete sentences, punctuation, capital letters.  Those are embedded in my brain just as predictably as watching “Jeopardy” every night at 7:30.   Yes, I know – I could record it and watch it at a more convenient time, which is, like, each weeknight at 7:30. Learning to spell words correctly is totally last century.  Who needs it?  Electronics point out misspellings and correct words for us much faster than looking up them up, and there’s an added benefit when autocorrect changes the words and the meanings completely.  Sometimes it takes longer to proof what I’ve written because it made changes it thought I wanted.  Our overthinking brains have made machines that overthink too.  But, we’ve saved valuable time.

There is no doubt that America is committed to getting things done faster and better so we can save time.  Just driving is non-productive.  I’ve seen people, and I’m not making this up, reading newspapers, eating breakfast, shaving, and applying make-up  while driving down the highway.  In one bizarre instance, I watched a guy in the next car – to be sure, it was heavy stop-and-go traffic – with drumsticks and a sheet of music propped, drumming away merrily on the steering wheel.  Why practice at home when you can do it in the car? We’re moving to self-driving cars so we presumably can do more stuff while on the road and not make an unfriendly acquaintance with a guardrail or the car in front of us – really important stuff like answering correspondence, talking to people, buying and selling stocks, checking the weather to know if we need to drive safely (oh, wait, the car does that too).  We buy, then update every few weeks, new devices that do more daily functions for us, like sending out mass communications through “social media” of everything we’re thinking and doing – whether anyone else cares or wants to know. Some people I know spend more time writing about their lives on Facebook than they actually spend living it.   Who has time to read it all?  I know I’m too busy.

Grocery stores have large sections of prepared meals because, well, who has time to cook?  Television adds show us meals that can be prepared in no time, because families are busy and parents are late getting home.  Some grocery chains have delivery service, while one near me has started with an online service.  You send them the order, and their minions dash out to the car with it, because nobody I know has time to roam the aisles putting what they need in a cart, which of course replaced picking it in the garden.

There’s a great appliance ad on tv right now.  It shows a person in the frozen foods section looking frustrated because she forgot her shopping list.  Rather than writing down what she needed and putting it in her pocket, she needs this next level of refrigerator technology, where you can punch in what you need on the door-mounted tablet that connects to an app on your phone.  That wouldn’t work for me, the old timer, because I’m more likely to remember the piece of paper than my phone.  But that’s only because I feel an urge to push people who are using their phones out of my way like ancient Floridians.  These fine folks move at the speed of grass growing, while the shopping focus is long gone.  Somehow, they manage to find the exact center of each aisle.  These will be the same people that have the phone app allowing them to “see into” their refrigerators.  They’ll be the ones checking their phones constantly to find out what they need, blissfully unaware of their adorable little children dancing around the store pulling items that look attractive off the shelves.

Americans even look to short cuts in life skills.  “This program will teach you to speak another language in two days.”  Really?  Why did I take four years of high school French?  I could just have waited for this handy conversation-starter before I’m qualified to serve as Ambassador to France.  “Learn to play a musical instrument in one month.”  OK, you too can have “Hot Crossed Buns” and “Long, Long Ago” ready for your Carnegie Hall debut.   Let’s get those baseball players into a major league game right out of high school.  Skip college – those degrees are really only for those lacking athletic prowess. (Even then, the athletic facilities always look way better than the History building.) Look what baseball did for Manny Ramirez.  He was one of the greats, and yet he still found time to check his cell messages while playing outfield. Within a generation, we won’t need these double, triple, and quadruple league teams.  Ship them right to Fenway Park to sink or swim.  If it doesn’t work out, they can always clerk at 7-Eleven or start a restaurant chain.

Yes, folks.  We’re in an age where everything we do takes too long, and it’s got to stop.  I was in line at the supermarket the other day to purchase the winning Powerball ticket, which, as it turns out later, I didn’t get – someone in Illinois did, although I do remember asking specifically for a winner.  Two people were ahead of me in line.  The first was buying a Western Union money order – at least that’s what it looked like.  Either that or he was wiring money to a Nigerian prince.  (For younger readers, Western Union was a communication system falling historically somewhere between the Pony Express and the rotary dial telephone.) The next lady was paying her electric bill, with, and get this because I too was stunned, a check. Apparently she has trust issues with both the internet and the postal service.  These two will be just pleasant footnotes in the 21^st century.  Turning the page of a book is just too much – we need a tablet where we just flick our fingers and the pages turns themselves. Find out what’s on the President’s mind, forget CNN.  Go directly to Twitter.  Reading a newspaper – that’s out of the question.  Just give us the headlines – we’ll figure out what it all means and scramble it aroundin our brains by ourselves.  As my grandfather used to say, “my mind’s made up – don’t confuse me with facts.” It may be wrong, but it’s fast.

Let’ add a little something to Old Glory, as it’s been largely the same since Hawaii joined us in 1959.  We should put a legend in large letters arching across the stripes: “USA First”.  No, wait, that sounds a bit too self-absorbed, just a tad too “ about me” .   “USA – Get Out of Our Way!”  I like it.  Would someone mind texting this to foreign governments around the world? I would, but I don’t have time.