a stupid country

This is a stupid country.
This afternoon I drove 24 miles (round trip) to deliver a bottle of urine to my father's kidney doctor.

This was the second time I made the trip. The first time I made the trip they refused to accept my offering because the appropriate medical worker was not present. (Apparently, they did not have a free refrigerator where I could leave the urine.)

There has got to be a better way.

On top of wasting more than an hour of my time, the whole process needlessly contributes to global warming.

This is a stupid, idiotic way to run a society.

An After-Thought: The Provincial Ethnocentrism of the West

The incident described above involved a series of interchanges with people who were, from one point of view, consistently friendly and polite.--Consistently friendly, smily and polite, yet my ease at getting done what I needed to do was not existent.

And, in general, having been away and returned to the USA, this is my consistent impression. Here in the country with the ability to cause more death and destruction than any other, politeness masks arbitrary power and does not replace it or eliminate it. (I think of the "friendly" and "polite" bouncer at KMart who I've described in previous blogs.)

Recently I spoke to a young resident of the UK who remarked in passing on the bad behavior of people in shops in the Czech Republic. I wonder if that citizen has ever experienced the blunt and intrusive and arrogant questioning style of the UK border control bureaucracy....I have.. and as I think of it now, I believe that the citizens of the UK and the citizens of the USA really have no reason to count themselve superior to Czechs or Slovaks... not on the score of the quality of human relationships.......