Bush Lied, Shopping Carts Dinged People’s Cars
It’s called ”Bradley Crushes Insurgent Car,” which makes this bit of war zone fun a public service. via Mudville Gazette, for all your on-the-ground war zone vid and reading needs.
Unrelated, entirely different, or not. Two Boston Herald columnists have now weighed in on that key indicator of social decay, the unreturned shopping cart. We’ll start with Alan Lupo:
Maybe it shouldn’t bother me. Maybe I’m just getting to be a cranky old guy.
I certainly qualify for that role. There I am, sitting on a bench at the Northgate shopping mall in Revere. I am waiting for my wife to finish shopping. That’s what old guys do; it’s our job, and we are good at it.
But maybe age and crankiness have nothing to do with what is bugging me.
Two young women emerge from a store. One is pushing a shopping cart. She empties her new goods into a van that’s larger than a World War II Sherman tank. She is only a few yards from the store that she has just patronized. But she leaves the empty cart where cars are parked.
“Oooh!” she yells as the cart rolls on its own toward the Sherman tank. So, does she now return the cart to the sidewalk? Nah, she just pushes it a few inches away.
This is not an old person, nor does she appear to be pregnant or lame. For all I know, she and her friend are very nice people. But in the time it takes her to play with that cart, she could return it rather than leaving it in the way of somebody else.
Is this laziness or, maybe, a sense of entitlement somewhere in the subconscious?
In heading to the mall and after leaving it, we witness two motorists who fail to grasp the concept of the rotary. It is simple. You wait until the rotary is clear of oncoming cars, and then it is your turn. These drivers don’t understand, can’t measure distances or simply do not wish to be bothered.
The behavior is not peculiar to that woman, the drivers, the city of Revere or the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
We natives love to talk and laugh about our idiosyncrasies, but this sense of entitlement knows no geographic borders. Try getting in the way of a veteran subway rider in Manhattan or a Texas motorist driving at 70 miles per hour in the middle of a sleet storm.
Indeed, as a columnist, I now feel entitled, in this case, to make a great leap from malls and rotaries to what I fear is a national problem.
We Americans have had it good for a very long time, and I selfishly hope that continues, but it can’t.
In the years following World War II, we were king of the hill. We were engaged in a domestic boom of construction, transportation, education, you name it. We manufactured everything from gigantic cars with ostentatious tail fins to washers, dryers, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and feel free to name it again.
Even as economic competition increased, my contemporaries and I believed that what essentially had become the American empire would go on forever. We were naive. No empire lasts forever. Ask the Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Brits.
In these complicated times, we Americans must prove our mettle again on a number of fronts, diplomatic, economic, military. We have become a debtor nation and have learned that military incursions and patriotic speechifying can’t solve everything. Maybe high gas costs is one of the prices we pay.
We may need to learn to compromise that sense of entitlement, the idea that we can leave our collective shopping cart wherever we like and the rest of the world will not object.
It is not an easy lesson, but the true strength of character for both individuals and a nation is whether one can shed entitlement without feeling any loss of pride.
OK. Bush lied, shopping carts dinged people’s cars. No blood for shopping carts. I dunno. I’d take the exact opposite tack. Not finding Revere primary elections results, but I’ll take a wild guess that a lot of those shopping cart scofflaws are Obama/Clinton voters. If they plan on voting at all. The people I know who are most interested in making the world a better place, with little sense of entitlement, are putting away the world’s shopping carts in Iraq, Afghanistan … Germany, Japan and Korea, for that matter.
Herald’s important shopping cart coverage continues with Margery Eagan, admitted shopping cart scofflaw … not a big surprise to readers who recall Margery’s prior confessions about the utter chaos that is her personal life … with some sociological observations. Her observation that la-di-dah Brookline puts away, while lumpenprole East Boston is too traumatized to bother doesn’t speak to the political question. They are definitely Obamist/Clintonites in Brookline of the “think globally/act locally” variety, heavily Clintonista in East Boston. I have no doubt the shopping carts of Brookline are neatly put away. The politically inconvenient global shopping cart we call Iraq can go to hell.
My own shopping cart beef is that at my supermarket, they just removed the cart corrals from half of the parking lot lanes, rather than replace them. So you either have to weave through the cars to the next lane over, or go all the way back to the store. Cheap bastards just made it harder to do the right thing. A once largely well-kept lot is now like a shopping cart war zone.
Tigerhawk with an update on people willing to put away the world’s shopping carts.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:20 am on Tuesday, May 13, 2008
6 Responses to “Bush Lied, Shopping Carts Dinged People’s Cars”
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May 13th, 2008 at 9:50 am
I agree with you, the Obama/Clinton voting types are more likely to abandon their carts; it’s a practical application of their “cut & run” philosophy.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:15 am
It saddens me to see Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” and lowered expectations coming back into fashion. Never have I seen so many people, so well off, whine so damn much. At least back in Jimmy’s day there were a few reasons to whine - mostly self inflicted, of course, but still there. Now it’s just constant bemoaning from a certain large segment of our society, mostly from the people who have the least reason to be dissatisfied.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:58 am
I’ve been painfully aware of the “shopping cart” syndrome for a lot of years, largely through my experiences with graduate students in their thirties who are still depending on mom and dad for, well, everything. For a long time, I put it down to my increasing fogyism, but not any more. My patience is at an end.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Incidentally, the video made me smile, but then, I’m feeling especially cranky today.
May 13th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
I think the “shopping cart” metaphor is appropriate for what I observe to be a widespread abandonment of personal accountability. I would take that great line from “As Good As It Gets” and modify it as follows:
Liberal values are simply conservative values, without the reason and the personal accountability.
May 14th, 2008 at 2:46 am
One of my buddy’s LT tried that on a Russian made 5 ton in the Gulf War and the track ended up on it’s side. The LT refused to get out of his hatch until the wrecker got there to right him……doh.