Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Really? That's the worst you've got??

Recently a website called Stamps.com started running a television ad wherein numerous very busy business-type people talk about how convenient it is to do all their snail mail postage online.  One guy says, "There's nothing worse than waiting in line at the post office."

Really?  NOTHING?


I can think of lots of things that are worse than waiting in line at the post office.  I'm sure all of us can.  Living in constant pain,  Dying by fire.  Losing a child.  Dying of ovarian cancer at a young age.  Loving someone who is dying of ovarian cancer at a young age.  You get the idea.

I think the reason I am so very offended by this ad is that, for me, it symbolizes the fatuous, frivolous, me-centric, over-inflated-sense-of-personal-entitlement society we are becoming.  Of course there's "nothing worse than waiting in line at the post office" for these people.  They're the same folks who tailgate you when you're already doing the speed limit on a wet road, or who pass illegally on the highway.  Their errands and schedules are simply more important than yours.  Because they are simply more important than you.

It also seems to me to be similar to the Tea Party hypocrites who are all set to kill government entitlements...until they themselves are entitled to them.  I am thinking of one female Fox News commentator who moaned and groaned about family leave and how it takes money out of corporate pockets...until she got pregnant and took advantage of family leave herself.  When someone made a joke about her "vacation" she vigorously defended the same Family Leave Act that she had derided only a year or so before.  It's the same thing with the Tea Party.  They want to hand out school vouchers and kill daycare programs and all other kinds of beneficial government spending -- programs that have been proven in the long-term to actually save money -- until and unless it affects their kids and their schools and their programs.  And the people who would most be affected negatively by their idiocy are their greatest proponents.

I don't get it.

If you can work a calculator, you can figure out pretty quickly that Cain's "9-9-9" or Perry's 20% Flat Tax proposals are BAD IDEAS that will cost the ever-diminishing middle class more money than they are paying now, thereby further eroding the financial backbone of this country.  Occupy Wall Street has one thing right, at least:  we are well on our way to becoming a society of wealthy overlords and peasants, with precious little in between, largely because of the greed and misinformation pumped out by the wealthiest of us and by the corporations who have their interests, not mine, at their core.

Something to really think about when you're in line at the post office.

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