Pretty Sure I Saw Racism at the Pharmacy

True story...I've had a sickness of some sort (it's been called bronchitis, pneumonia, even whooping cough) since early December. I've taken three rounds of antibiotics, got better for the course of treatment, then I'm sick all over again.

Started feeling it coming back yesterday, so I decided to be proactive and call the doctor today. Apparently it's a sinus infection this week, and they're trying a different antibiotic along with still more codeine cough medicine.

The doctor faxed the Clindamycin script to Walgreen's, but the Phenergan with Codeine is apparently a controlled substance, so I had to deliver a paper copy, show ID, promise there is no meth lab in my basement...

I should probably mention that my pharmacy is sort of in the ghetto. It's an inner-city kind of drugstore. I almost never leave there without some sort of story...

For example, today there was a guy talking in rapid Spanish on his cell phone, quite loudly. I know enough Spanish to infer that he was getting hell from his wife/girlfriend/maybe even mother for not coming home last night. His excuses were increasingly creative, and when he got called up to the pharmacy and said, "Te amo" into the phone, he got hung up on. Poor guy's night got even worse because he was apparently one day early for his nicotine patch prescription. He was pretty irate because he'd been waiting for awhile and it took him that long for Walgreen's to inform him that he'd have to come back tomorrow. I felt like stepping in and saying to the pharmacy tech, "Come on, dude, he's in deep shit with a female in his life. He wants a patch instead of a cigarette. You'll give it to him at nine in the morning but not now?", but I was already pretty pissed off about something that happened to me earlier.

So I mentioned that my Walgreen's is an inner-city one. I enjoy going there because I almost always encounter interesting people. I am usually an ethnic minority and I perhaps have a higher grasp of the nuances of English grammar, but none of that really matters. I've had men that don't speak English get something off a shelf for me. I've held the newborn baby of a young Hispanic mother while she went to the bathroom (must be my honest face...she didn't speak English, either). I've crawled around on the floor picking up a display of boxes an old man accidentally knocked over (tears of gratitude on that one).

So, yeah, this is my store. These are my people. I have never felt unsafe or in danger there. I've never felt disrespected or looked down on there. 

Until today.

I knew it was busy from the moment I had to park my car in a spot not right in front of the store, so I wasn't surprised that there was a line at the pharmacy. There were four people ahead of me. 

My cough sounded wonderful, and the young African-American kid in front of me kindly offered to let me go ahead of him. I thanked him but told him he'd been waiting and that was fine. He asked if I was sure (I suspect he didn't want to catchy my pestilence), and I said that I was but appreciated the gesture.

And then the game-changer walked toward the pharmacy...

He was a middle-aged man wearing a camel hair suit coat, creased khakis, loafers that I'm pretty sure had "Gucci" stamped on them. He was wearing a Rolex, and he carried himself like he was better than everyone else.

He carried himself, in fact, right past the long line and to the front of the counter, where he stood drumming his fingers on the Walgreen's sign and looking expectantly toward the pharmacist. "Picking up for Jones," he called in a calm voice that was loud enough to carry over.

And I'll be damned if they didn't stop what they were doing and get this guy his prescriptions! 

Never mind that the waiting line was five people deep. Never mind that those of us waiting had shown patience, tolerance, and, yes, kindness to each other.

It wasn't until that moment, as I started coughing so hard I thanked God for pantiliners that catch leaked pee, that I realized I was going to have to wait even longer to even *drop off* my codeine cough medicine, never mind get to bring it home and take it.

And why?

Because this rich-looking white guy thought the rules didn't apply to him...and the idiots at Walgreen's backed him up on that!

I was appalled!

Anyway, I finally got my prescription dropped off (and heard the saga of Unfaithful Nicotine Patch Dude), but I was so disillusioned.

It got me wondering if I had worn a dress and nice shoes (I have both, although I don't often wear either) and put my one-carat diamond earrings in, replaced my trusty Vera Bradley purse with the more stylish one with a Coach label, straightened my hair and put on makeup (I can still look pretty good when I try; I just don't see the need to try very often)...could I have pushed my way to the front, gotten my medicine, and been treated like I was superior to the other customers?

Sadly, I'm pretty sure the answer is yes.

Racism (or maybe it's classism??) still exists, make no mistake about it. I just wish I hadn't had to see it...

Has racism ever reared its ugly head when you were least expecting it?

Book Parallels: "The Bottoms" and "To Kill a Mockingbird"

I've spent the past two days home sick with some really horrific cold/flu/high fever/horrible headache/body ache/cough/generally feeling like crap kind of thing.  

I hate being sick for obvious reasons, and I hate missing work for reasons too numerous to name.  However, one of the few positives is that I was pretty much confined to bed (I'm not a "lay in bed" kind of person ... when I choose bed over lounging on the couch or in the recliner, it means I really feel dreadful), which meant, of course, that I got to read.

Henry lent me The Bottoms by Joe R. Lansdale several weeks ago, and I'm ashamed to say that it's taken me this long to read, even though I liked it from the start.  Once I got a chance to dig in, though, despite it being in and out of fever-riddled sleep and Nyquil daze, I couldn't put it down. 

Especially when I started noting parallels to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, probably my most beloved book ever.  I was in English teacher ecstasy throughout, I tell you :-)

I know that To Kill a Mockingbird is both well-loved and widely read.  Lansdale, who is considered more of a "cult favorite", achieves masterpiece status in my mind with his very similar offering.

Both books ...

*  Explore the strong bonds of love that exist between siblings.

Interestingly, The Bottoms is narrated by "big brother" Harry Collins, who feels deeply the tremendous responsibility of keeping his younger sister, Tom (short for Thomasina) safe.  Makes me wonder how different Mockingbird would be if told from Jem's point of view ...

*  Take a contemporary reader into a world where blacks are treated horribly.

Perhaps because of Scout's tender age, the specific horrors of life as an African-American in Maycomb, Alabama aren't expounded upon in detail.

Lansdale pulls no punches in the small east Texas town portrayed in The Bottoms, with the KKK figuring prominently into the story, white doctors refusing to perform an autopsy on a brutally murdered black woman, tarring and feathering, and the lynching of an old black man who was very briefly considered a witness in the murder of a white woman.    

*  Force the protagonist (well, brother/sister team of protagonists, I suppose) to realize that the person-cum-monster that colored the nightmares of childhood are both more and less than what they appear to be on the surface (or in local legend)

Call him Boo Radley or the Goat Man, but this lesson is one that stays with a reader.

There are lots of other connections between the two (too many to list, actually, without being a total spoiler), but I just had to share how cool I found it that another book was able to, in some small way, address the very tough themes and issues brought up in what's arguably my favorite book ever.

I'd never seen it done before on such a grand scale, and I'd never really heard much of Joe R. Lansdale before Henry introduced me.

I figured it was  my responsibility to pay it forward.

Thank You, Dr. King

And no, I don't mean for the day off from work.

Sometimes a person comes along that virtually everyone can relate to, even if they don't want to admit it. Sometimes these people become famous. Quite often, they don't; instead, they are stifled before they can achieve their potential and end up pushing paper for an insurance company (not that I have anyone in mind or anything :-) ) and their good works are never realized, are not put down in the annals of time.

But sometimes destiny works out differently, as with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. King's focus on addressing racial segregation and discrimination are well documented, particularly his urging of civil disobedience in the face of unspeakable adversaries. There are always approaches other than violence, and Dr. King made crystal clear the fact that you can move metaphoric mountains without raising an angry hand.

Not as well known are Dr. King's position opposing the Vietnam War on religious grounds (I have a minor obsession with the Vietnam War, which goes with my late sixties obsession) or his tireless work to abolish poverty, perhaps as big a "racial" divide as that between black and white.

I think Dr. King would be unspeakably proud of Barack Obama and all of us who supported him when he is sworn in as the 44th U.S. president tomorrow (although King himself might have achieved this had his life not been cut short by an assassin's bullet). Sadly, though, I also think that Dr. King would be ashamed and appalled by the abject poverty that still permeates our country and keeps the American Dream forever at bay for many, many people.

I am not blind to Dr. King's faults or unaware of some of the less-than-savory things he did (I've researched the whole doctoral thesis uproar, for example, and yeah, he plagiarized), but I think that when someone comes along and is just at the right junction of time and space and is able to touch and motivate and inspire so very many people, it is just a remarkable and beautiful thing.

Thank you, Dr. King, for your hard work, your peaceful soul, and especially your inspiration. The torch you lit still burns today, and I think it will be burning especially bright tomorrow at noontime.

Racism in New Hampshire

Even as I write this, I know that people may read it and be insulted, annoyed, maybe even furious. However, the fact is, in many cases there is a double standard that comes down to skin color. Why can't we judge people based on their merits (or lack thereof) rather than letting something as irrelevant as the way they look come into it?

First and foremost, I have mixed feelings about the death penalty in general. I mean, I think the idea of putting someone to death as a punishment sort of defeats the purpose in that who are we to decide on that ultimate a punishment? In foreign countries, for example, "crimes" such as adultery which are virtually accepted here are punishable by death. Who gets to make that call? Society? Which society is right? Are any?

If you want to follow the Bible as the guiding force here, Jesus Christ taught and lived forgiveness (the guy was crucified yet cried out to God, "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do") while the Ten Commandments state explicitly, "Thou shalt not kill", and then there's the whole "eye for an eye" thing.

This is a level of philosophy that I waver on--I am so unsure as to my own views on the death penalty that I can't come down on either side in writing. I'm curious as to what others think, so feel free to comment. I'm open for debate, since it depends on the day with me, in many ways.

A man named Michael Addison was sentenced to death in New Hampshire today. Addison shot a police officer named Michael Briggs and unquestionably deserved severe punishment. The family and friends of Officer Briggs have suffered a loss they will never recover from, and that's a crime that Addison will have to answer to a higher power for no matter what we do to him here on Earth.

My issue is that in August of 1997, another New Hampshire police officer, Epsom's Jeremy Charron, was killed in the line of duty by two men named Gordon Perry and Kevin Paul. Perry, who did the actual shooting, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole while Paul received a 16-50 year prison sentence.

Did I mention that Michael Addison is an African-American?

Lipstick on a Pig

Back when the election was getting hot and heavy, a political cartoon by Glenn McCoy depicting Barack Obama as a mental asylum inmate appeared in my local newspaper. Restrained in a straitjacket, Obama has clearly been writing the word "Sarah" with his foot all over the walls of his padded white room ... in lipstick. The clearly simian bend of McCoy's portrayal (the monkey-like face is overshadowed by the clenched ape foot clutching the tube of lipstick) is obviously a not-so-subtle jab at Obama's race.

So where’s the outcry? I mean, the chorus of dissent over Obama's use of a popular political phrase reached the rafters, but why are cheap shots about the fact that Obama is an African-American allowed to pass without comment? I'm a white female, and my increasing awareness of the double-standard allowing everything that might possibly be seen as anti-woman being blown out of proportion while blatant jabs at African-Americans are evidently fair game is starting to really make me angry.

If anyone hasn't heard about it, Senator Obama said, in reference to McCain's economic policy, "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig." For some reason, this was taken as somehow referring to Sarah Palin and, faster than you can say hypocrisy, the word was out that Obama had made an anti-woman crack.

The phrase, "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig" is clearly another way of saying that, no matter what short-term appearance fixer you put on something ugly, it's still going to be ugly. In other words, you can't change what something is by playing with its outward appearance. A similar phrase involves the inability to make chicken salad out of chicken shit, but I digress.

The fact that John McCain said of Hillary Clinton's health care plan, "I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig" in Iowa last October (that's less than a year ago) is for some reason not getting the same press. There was no feminist outcry last October, and there is very little mention of this in response to the public skewering Obama is currently taking.

A longtime part of used-car dealership jargon, the phrase was, according to Time magazine, first exposed to the public in 1985 when a news station said using its financial surplus to renovate Candlestick Park would be like "putting lipstick on a pig." Since then, the phrase has been used by (in no particular order) Elizabeth Edwards, Dick Cheney, Torie Clark (former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs under Rumsfeld, former communications chief for the Pentagon for a portion of Bush's presidency, and former McCain press secretary), John Edwards, and House Minority Leader John Boehner as well as by John McCain and Barack Obama.

The overblown criticism Obama has taken for his use of a saying that has been used by a variety of people from differing walks of life is just adding to the surreality of this campaign. That direct cracks directed at Obama (a la McCoy's political cartoon) are somehow fair game only add to the bitterness that is starting to really bog me down and look at my country with a cynical eye.

Has anyone else noticed this, or am I just overly sensitive, cynical, or out-and-out wrong?