Donald Trump said recently that the U.S. is like a third-world country. I have been thinking along the same lines for the past few years. But I see America’s third-world-ness as a trend, not (yet) an actuality. In any event, the trend is real and it irks me.
I don’t care about air-travel snafus, which seem to have become more frequent and extensive in recent years. I last flew in September 2021, and it was the last time that I will fly anywhere. The last time that I flew and enjoyed the experience was in 1964, when my bride-to-be and I traveled from Dulles to Orly an a Pan American flight. (Our wedding was to be in Germany, where the parents of my fiancée then lived.) The stewardesses (as they were then called) were young to youngish, trim, smartly uniformed, and definitely female. The tasty meals were served on plates, and the flatware was the real thing — not plastic. And we were in the coach section (now called economy). Oh, well.
What I do care about are the many ways in which service has deteriorated in the past few years. Take my local Post Office — please! Word has it that there are ten unfilled positions for letter carriers, with the result that mail delivery is hit and miss. And to be sure that a mailpiece is picked up, I take it to the Post Office. (Yes, there are still some good reasons to use first-class mail.) How could there not be qualified applicants for those ten slots when the real unemployment rate is about three times the government-approved one? Hold that question; I’ll come back to it.
Shopping at a grocery store has become more of a challenge to my (admittedly) thin veneer of patience. Where are the carts? Scattered around the parking lot because there are too few persons willing to work for the wage that cart-corralling commands. Where is that or that item? Not in its assigned space on the shelves because the “supply chain” problem hasn’t gone away. Where are the cashiers who used to man (generic word) the many, now unused, scanners (formerly known as cash registers)? See “carts”, above. How are my groceries bagged when the semi-competent checker-outer has sent them past the scanner? Not very well. (I speak as an expert, whose first job was bagging groceries — a not-so-simple task for which I was actually trained many decades ago. I must also add that the cashiers for whom I bagged groceries were so fast at their jobs — without the benefit of scanners — that it was a challenge for me to keep up with them and bag groceries correctly. And I was a whiz at bagging.)
I would go on and on about the adventures of shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, but almost all of my non-grocery shopping now consists of adding to the astronomical number of items that I have bought at Amazon (and other online retailers) in the past 25 years. Even there, however, there has been some deterioration in recent years: more frequent returns of shoddy items, more misdeliveries and failures to deliver on time. But online shopping still beats the other kind for ease of comparison-shopping, ease of finding the right item, the avoidance of incompetent clerks (if one of any description can be found), and the avoidance of driving to and from a shopping mall and milling around in it (usually to no good end). It usually costs less, too.
But automation has its limits. In addition to shopping for groceries of the kind that require first-hand inspection and the assurance of freshness, there are things like haircuts and dining out.
Dining out — even at upscale restaurants — has become a game of chance. Once again, the main problem (as with shopping) has become the availability and competence of the people who work directly with the public; in this case, the waiters (to use another appropriate but now verboten word). Are they attentive but not pushy? Usually, but they are too often not in sight when needed, which suggests that management is unable to hire enough competent waiters. (Again, see “carts”.) Do they know how to serve properly? It’s close call, even at what is arguably the best restaurant in the city where I live.
The bigger problem with dining out these days is noise. Except at very expensive restaurants, the level of noise has become so ear-shattering that it has become a challenge (for me, at least) to carry on a conversation while dining. And it’s a problem only in restaurants. Even grocery stores have succumbed to the trend of playing “background” music of a kind that is appropriate only among the set whose primary occupation seems to be rioting and looting.
There are many other indicators of social decline — mass shootings, rampant road-rage, red-light running as a habitual practice, F-bombs on broadcast TV, children shooting school teachers, rioting in the name of the “right” to kill unborn children, and on and on and on.
What’s behind it all? The “shortage” of workers that plagues retail outlets (and other kinds of establishments) can be attributed directly to the ever-growing number and munificence of government handouts. (For a partial tally, see the note at the end of “The Myth of the Red-Hot Labor Market”.) But the willingness to accept handouts instead of working is just a symptom of the broader decline in America. The same goes for the view that abortion should be a “right”.
It’s all part of the general decline of personal responsibility, which is concomitant with and a direct (if subtle) result of the rise in dependence on government. Beginning in the so-called Progressive Era of the late 1800s, there has been an unremitting and largely successful campaign to usurp and destroy the institutions of civil society that used to transmit, inculcate, and enforce civilizing norms. That campaign has been waged by the same “elites” who have conspired in recent years to destroy their most powerful opponent (Trump); to disrupt economic and social intercourse in a foolish, fruitless, counterproductive, and hysterical effort to defeat a pandemic; to suppress and censor persons and groups who challenge their destructive economic, political, and social nonsense; and to disarm America in the face of growing military challenges from Russia, China, and others, while wasting America’s treasure on an irrelevant sideshow war.
Other related posts:
The Bitter Fruits of America’s Disintegration
The Great Resignation in Perspective
Mass Murder: Reaping What Was Sown
The Slippery Slope from Liberty to Tyranny
Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society
Turning Points in America’s History