The problem with America

I'm housesitting at Lori's house until the 25th. Lori is my neighbor, and I think she feeds her two dogs Chinese food, because when I take them for walks they shit huge yellow piles of shit, just like a person who has eaten too much Chinese food. And they don't shit like discriminating dogs, either, sniffing around for the best place to suspend themselves over a bed of ivy or in tall grass. No, the best places to shit are the middle of the street and freshly-mowed lawns. Sometimes they'll do it while running at full speed.

A grizzly old neighbor walked up to me while I removed one such mess from his yard with a plastic shopping bag. His name is Rob. "Those Lori's dogs?" Rob asked. I told him yeah. "That's very good of you," he said.

Rob wore a navy blue stocking cap and dirty brown trousers. He had shaved since I saw him last, but there were two patches of thick stubble under his chin, and long, gray strands of hair on his neck poked out from his buttoned-up plaid shirt.

Rob learned from my dad that I went to journalism school. He has story ideas for me. "What do you think about government corruption?" he asked. I told him I think it's ubiquitous. I think it's everywhere. There's a lot of money and power going around, and there are a lot of smart people who aren't using it very wisely.

"A report came out that says there aren't enough journalists covering the government. There aren't enough journalists enforcing transparency," Rob told me. "The real problem is Americans are too lazy to care."

"Maybe," I said. The problem reminded me of the scarcity of qualified math and science teachers. Maybe the problem isn't with the public, but with the desirability of jobs in investigative journalism.

Rob dismissed that.

"I'm a 'Depression baby,'" he explained to me. "I remember the Depression. I remember Roosevelt's speeches and the War." Rob told me a story about when his father fixed potholes during the Depression just to keep busy. "The roads were bad, so he fixed 'em. People fixed things because they were broken. Americans today…"

"Are lazy," I chimed in. "Exactly," he said. I regretted chiming in. I don't like finishing other people's sentences; it seems rude. But I do it without thinking, sometimes.

"At this point the government is like a Gordian knot. It's time to put away the scalpel."

"I'll never forget––I forget what government agency it was–– but I saw a man behind a desk with a stack of papers on it. He opened a drawer in the desk, picked up the stack, and put it in the drawer. Then he picked up another stack of papers and put it on the desk. Then, he opened the drawer he just closed, pulled out the old stack of papers, and put that stack on the table. Then he took the other stack, put it in the open drawer, and closed it. He did this over and over again in a circle while I watched for half an hour."

The plastic shopping bag full of goopy yellow dog shit swayed and began to stink. I told Rob we should talk about this again sometime. "Can't. I got shit to do," he said.

Talking with Rob reminded me of the nearly $7 billion missing from funds sent to Iraq. It reminded me of the sweep of the Tea Party's platform. Could these people be right, that we're thinking when we should be removing crooked politicians from office and alleviating the national debt and holding public servants responsible?

I don't think so. We had years to think about the problems we have now. There are probably even a few people who saw all this coming, way back when. I think we have a lot of thinking to do––just not a lot of time to do it.