For What Its Worth

Bubbie jumped on the Harley and rode to the beach. The smell of the salt air as he traveled thru the sawgrass flats to get out there is transcendent, timeless. It's thick and fills his nostrils making it heavy to breathe and yet gratifying. He feels his lungs pulling the oxygen from the salty air. The warm wind on his face. Every trip out thru the sawgrass, the huge expanse of palm tree and cedar islands, if I caught a glimpse of an elephant or giraffe out of the corner of my eye I wouldn't be surprised. As a matter of fact, sometimes he thinks he has… just for a moment.

It was windy and a little overcast so the sands were sparsely dotted with naked Yankees outnumbered by the slightly more cantankerous seagulls. Sandpipers scurry and bob, their twiggy beaks probing the sand. Children chase the birds in vane. A big flock of black skimmer terns land en masse on the sand with their beaks pointed east into the wind. 

In Bubbie's view, the freedom that comes along with the ride is a spirit that we should all carry in our hearts. The beauty of our American landscape should be retained in our minds and we'd willingly sacrifice and fight for our country.

Reverse Entitlement

Entitlement as defined in the dictionary as belief that one is deserving of or entitled to certain privileges. When you think entitlement, you think of government programs. But more specifically, you think of the mentality of the lazy who’ve come to expect and depend upon the fruits of government programs passed down to them. Recently Uncle Bubba has experienced kind of a reverse entitlement that, if we admit it, is all too common. This is where lazy people have a job and are bad at it. He described his experience as the perceived entitlement of nosey busybodies that think that it is OK to get into his personal business. You know the type, the self righteous lady that has the Nazi-istic approach to customer service. They try to make their problem your problem. He or she crosses expected boundaries, not to assist you but to assist themselves in getting you to do their work for them. They are unconscionable in their annoyed attitude and lacky-ism to the company cutting their paycheck. If these people worked for us we'd fire them immediately, without question. Uncle Bubba shared an example of how insidious this reverse entitlement has penetrated our culture. Certain employees in the Human Resources Department, the department focused on the personnel regarding them as a significant asset, are far less focused on support of the person as they are in arbitrarily interpreting company policy to avoid actually working. This always results in erroneously, yet irreversibly taking money out of Bubbie's pocket simply because they can without redress. It would take effort to do more, to assist Bubbie, improving his attitude and thus retaining a good, productive employee. I offered to Bubbie that these folks had a job to do like anybody else.

He said that he didn't begrudge anyone that, it is beyond that. It is the arrogant designation of authority that these idiots (his words) think that they have over anyone in their field of view. They have tunnel vision. It's as though they've trained themselves to not recognize that we are people behind the issue that they are trying to resolve. Most of us, the victims of reverse entitlement are good people with incredibly complex and complicated lives. We have our own jobs to perform and our daily struggles. In Bubbie's view, this laziness can only be remedied through personal accountability and the recognition of our humanity.