Super Duper Case History: Fill & Download for Free

Wag our fingers. That's about it. And -- frankly -- that's about all we can do. What are we going to do? Invade the world's "other" nuclear power with a capacity to annihilate humanity? No. Embargo? And plunge eastern Europe (including Germany) into fuel shortages that will take all of Europe and then the rest of the world into a global depression? Unlikely.This really sucks. It sucks on so many levels, but in this particular case, there's zilch we can do other than wag our fingers and scream about how nasty that Putin is. But, if it seems unethical and wrong, just remember all the times the USA, Britain and France invaded other countries "within their sphere of influence" for "really, super, duper good reasons".I'm not saying "sauce for the goose" is an excuse or justification. Putin is a megalomaniac. He's evil. He's corrupt. He's disgusting. But given how this world operates and the long history of great powers creating spheres of influence, if this whole situation has you upset remember: (a) look a little closer to home before freaking out and (b) what could we possibly do to stop this?

Ummmmm once some lady at Target started pulling the (approximately) 1,000 hangers off the clearance clothing items I was purchasing for my toddler. She was unimpressed by the speed at which the cashier was performing the task. My toddler was with me and so my response was a death glare as I took my items from her. I asked if she was aware of the fact that it was incredibly rude to touch things that did not belong to her and if she had some life and death engagement following her Target trip.She did, in fact, know that it was rude and no, no life would be lost if she exercised patience. I also passed on the helpful tip that next time, should she find herself in a hurry, she should arrive at Target before me so as to not be stuck behind me in line. I offered to take her information and meet her at the location of her choosing without my child to discuss our future Target trips and any other interesting topics but she declined.My favorite story about rude people out shopping though does not involve rudeness to me (well maybe but I was laughing so hard I didn’t notice.).I was in line at a grocery store purchasing produce I had run out of at the restaurant I was managing. There was, of course, one lane open as it was mid morning on a weekday and when I got in line there was a young woman in front of me with her two kids. She clearly did not keep a running total of her groceries as she shopped (I am frequently guilty of this as well) and now she was choosing items out of her bags to take off her bill as she looked from her children’s faces, to the money in her hand, to the cashier, to the screen displaying her total and then back to the bags to see what else she could live without because she didn’t have enough.Now, I was in a hurry (the inmates were running the asylum in my absence) BUT this woman was clearly upset and embarrassed already so I resigned myself to wait quietly. After watching a few minutes of her frantic head bobbing I couldn’t watch any more. It made my heart hurt so I inched up to lean over and tell her to just stop, I would pay whatever she was short. Just as I put my hand on her arm the woman behind me, whose disparaging grumbling had so far been mumbled under her breath and barely noticeable, says, very loudly “Jesus Christ, can’t you count? If you can’t afford to go shopping don’t go shopping. I have other shit to do today.”I quickly changed directions, patting the woman in front of me on the arm as I turned around to address the woman behind me.“Oh no, you’re right! She should be much more concerned about your schedule than feeding her children. Whatever was she thinking?”I turned back to the front, gave the frantic woman a reassuring smile in case she couldn’t hear my sarcasm, and then turned to the cashier. “Excuse me, is there a back up cashier you can call? This woman behind me must be terribly important if her time is more valuable than the health and well-being of children.”The cashier, who looked panic stricken stammered out an “I don’t know, let me call a manager.”To which I responded, “Oh yes, please do.”I turned back to the woman behind me “There, the cashier is escalating your concerns to someone more qualified to assist someone of your obvious importance. In the meantime, you just start thinking about all the things a wealthy, middle aged white woman has to be righteously indignant about so you’re prepared when the manager gets here.”Keep in mind folks, I am in full on Customer Service smile and I am over dramatically projecting my voice so that pretty much anyone within a 2 mile radius can hear me.Turning back to woman ahead of me I smile again and dig through my purse until I find enough change for the little quarter machines up front and hold it out to her. “Please, I would love to buy your groceries for you but it is going to take a minute. If your kids would be more comfortable over by those machines I will wave when I’m finished.”Honestly, I think she just thought I had multiple personalities or something at this point and took my change and her children over to the machines and away from the crazy lady.Anyway, I turned back to the cashier and asked for the items the woman had put back and she handed them to me and I put them in my basket. ”Excellent, I will first pay for the items you have rung up already and we will move forward from there.”The cashier looked at me and I swiped my card, entered my pin, selected no cash back, pushed the green button to accept the amount, waited for the cashier to hand me my receipt, folded the receipt, put it in my purse and handed her one item the woman had given her back. “I will need to pay for this item separately please.”The cashier just nodded and rang it up. I swiped my card, entered my pin, selected no cash back, pushed the green button to accept the amount, waited for the cashier to hand me my receipt, folded the receipt, put it in my purse and handed her a second item the woman had given her back.“I will need to pay for this item separately please.” The cashiers eyes widened as she realized what I intended to do and she looked at my cart, the fuming woman behind me and then back at my smiling face. Then she smiled and held out her hand for my next item.***Update due to the fact that I completely forgot about this answer and was surprised by the number of comments I had missed. 4/1/2020***So many comments about my decision to call the woman behind me out as being white….So many comments about what secret underlying motivations the woman behind me might have had to justify her unacceptable treatment of another person….So many comments about how the woman in front of me was too dumb to keep a running total, probably doesn’t remember this incident at all, doesn’t tell this story the same way I do, wasn’t worthy of my overly dramatic, passive aggressive form of justice…I don’t actually care how the lady, searching for enough money to pay for her groceries tells the story. Maybe she doesn’t remember it. Maybe she is a crack whore as her main occupation and I just caught her after the corner was especially slow and she was forced to sober out. I give exactly zero fucks. She is a human being, her children are human beings and in that moment they were being emotionally attacked and belittled by someone obviously in a better situation than them instead of being supported and treated with the empathy they deserved.I don’t actually care if the woman behind me was terminally ill and had exactly 21 minutes left to live. I don’t care if she was tired. I don’t care if she had corns the size of Wyoming and her feet hurt. I don’t care if she was in a hurry, over worked, underpaid or had just survived a near death experience and desperately need some Diet Coke and a snickers to celebrate her second chance at life. I give exactly zero fucks about what I don’t know. I do know, that she felt entitled to belittle and demean a mother in front of her children and that her behavior was unacceptable.If the lady in front of me had been Native American, I might only have pointed out the obvious income disparity. This is because I am super duper white, directly descended from the super duper white colonizers that claimed this country from its original inhabitants, wiped out their culture and then later, after being shamed into it, gave them back the worst parcels of land in “reparation” and cemented their financially handicapped existence in their own land.In the meantime, the super duper white colonizers were establishing settlements and enslaving an entire race of human beings, irrefutably changing the course of history for an entire other race of people forever.All because they could, because no one saw what was happening and said “No. Absolutely not acceptable.”This incident happened 15 years ago before racism and white privileged were part of the national conversation. It happened in St. Louis, where I was born and grew up poor.Now, if you’re from St. Louis, you will understand the division and racial under currents that have always existed there. If you’re not from St. Louis then perhaps you’ve heard of the Micheal Brown incident in 2014 that brought the racism conversation to the national stage in a way not seen since the 1992 riots that resulted from the brutal beating of Rodney King in CA.I spent 30 years in St. Louis and, from personal experience, can tell you I frequently benefited from white privileged. I know that because I’m willing to acknowledge it and call it what it is. 15 years ago I can almost guarantee that no one had ever called out that woman’s white privilege to her and, in the moment, I felt like she needed to hear it. I felt like she needed to hear it, so I said it, I said it, so I put it in the story.If you think calling out her whiteness is pandering to black people then I think you must be confused about the definition of pandering. Refusing to acknowledge racism doesn’t make it go away. Acknowledging it doesn’t solve the problem but the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. Racial disparity is a problem. Socioeconomic disparity is a problem.As a nation, we can’t solve these problems if we are offended by the mention of their existence. I mean, I get it, it makes us feel kinda shitty if we acknowledge it. It should, it’s ridiculously ignorant to treat human beings differently because of the amount of melanin in their skin; but the research and the data is there, it’s a fact. Accept it and let’s move forward.

It’s practically impossible to avoid eating GMOs, especially in the US. So yes, they do. GMO fearmongering is totally engineered by unscientific crybabies who fear modernity and invent bugbears because they have too much time on their hand. You might —just might— have a case to be made for caution, reasoning, “Hey, we only have one biosphere. Let’s move super-duper slowly.” But you have zero reason to fear consuming GMOs. There is zero peer reviewed scientific evidence that people are harmed by them.As for an ex-Monsanto executive running the FDA? No. (which hasn’t happened, but I’ll run with this) Why would I? What universe do you live in where there should be walls between corporate officers and government? I happen to think that it’s perfectly good, natural and smart to have an organic flow of talented professionals between the public and private sectors. Since I know that Monsanto isn’t an evil organization hellbent on destroying humanity, I wouldn’t have any more of a problem with one of their former leaders being at the FDA than I would a Wall Street banker working at Treasury or a Boeing executive working at Defense.I’ve only asked this like a trillion times. Show me one —original source, not from a propaganda website— piece of information that demonstrates that Monsanto is evil. You can find anything online. I can dig enough and find you people giving testimonials as to the health benefits of consuming their own urine. It’s the internet. If it can be thought of, it’ll be online. So, we come back to original source court documents, case law or a credible investigative piece of journalism that uses original sources to demonstrate Monsanto’s evil-ness. (You won’t find it)What you will find plenty of history of Monsanto doing what all companies do: suing those who violate its patents. Disney, GM, Microsoft and Google all do that. Companies —GET THIS!— are in the business of making money. The people who work at Monsanto don’t go in to work for foot massages and good vibes. They have mortgages and car payments. Their shareholders bought stock to make money. The kind of research Monsanto does, doesn’t come for free. It has to be paid for. So if you sign a contract with them —as contracts frequently stipulate— you have to play by the rules of the contract. Perish the thought!Is Monsanto evil?