Some Days...

Emma will need to forgive me for ranting a little bit here.  The impetus for all of this was my need to procure a social security card for Emma.  The hospital was supposed to order one, but somehow we never received the card in the mail.

So I walked over to the Social Security office on Chicago Avenue, about 15 minutes from where I work in downtown Minneapolis.  Some days you just have to hate the government.  To start, the building itself is miserable looking.  It looks exactly like what it is - a place for the government to submit it's citizens to the humiliation of needing their approval to live your life.  I had to wait 30 minutes to even get into the building due to security checks.  Some woman seemed to have backed all of her belongings into a suitcase, and brought that with her into the building.  I can only guess why.  At least she wasn't planning to blow up the place.

Be that as it may, the most depressing aspect of the experience was observing the people both in the building and on my walk to and from it.  People with defeated faces, who glance as you walk by and silently say that all hope is lost, nothing matters, I may as well be dead.  People who have been tossed aside and disregarded from the day they were born.  I wonder what horrible things have happened in their lives to produce such an effect.  Sadly, just giving them money to live won't fix anything - for one thing, life isn't so great for them, and money won't fix the root causes of their misery.  It will buy food, drugs, booze, and whatever else they need to endure they day.

At the office I think you see a true cross-section of current American life.  You realize that life really blows for a lot of people.  There are a lot more desperate people than those who are not.  Who can blame them for not trying, getting into trouble with the law, not caring about anything?  For some it looks like all they can manage is to make it until tomorrow.  I truly wonder about all of the laws and regulations the government has in place, and how they have affected people over the centuries.  To what degree is the government to blame for all of our problems?  Can they really fix them in our current political environment?  Or are they merely perpetuating their own political existence, oblivious to the lives of ordinary people?  How bad do things need to get before they actually address our problems?

So Emma, one day you will see these things, and maybe you will understand, and maybe you won't.  I hope that we live in a more civilized place when that time comes for you to learn about the true nature of our society.