GAS STATIONS AND FAST FOOD

It is said that if you want to know what the people believe, just ask a taxi-cab driver.

That’s because the people live on the ground. I mean, you will discover what the day to day folks believe by what you see in the everyday places. And it is in those everyday places that you get the clearest picture of where a neighborhood, a city, or a society is headed.

America’s everyday places are gas stations and fast food places. It is there where you feel the heart and experience the soul of Americans. That soul is dark, now, and the heartbeat is slowing.

Studies started coming out in the 1960s or so about the damage that tar and nicotine in gaseous form can do to one’s lungs and nervous systems. Then Hollywood picked up the torch (so to speak). After years of making it look cool, the entertainment industry turned out movie, and documentary, one after another, about the evil of Big Tobacco, and the danger of smoking.

The Government ratcheted things up with its warnings on the packs of cigarettes about the Surgeon General finding the sticks of paper and leaf as being a source of health problems. And then, it came up with regulations that removed cigarette advertisements from the airwaves. Then the States got into the act and fired off a number of lawsuits about the same time a number of little guys were suing Big Tobacco. In a number of major settlements, the Attorney Generals garnered a lot of money from the cigarette manufacturers – ostensibly to be placed into a fund and used to pay medical expenses of those suffering from lung cancer, emphysema, and more. Of course, it’s anybody’s guess where that money is now and how it was actually used. But that’s not the point of the settlements – the political careers of politicians was the important thing.

Billions of dollars poured out of the Tobacco companies and they agreed to undertake education campaigns that were to turn the young away from smoking or at least limit it. Businesses, governments, and everybody made smokers go outside to light up. Restaurants and cities stopped letting smokers dine and partake. Airlines cut out the smoking cabins. Smoking went up in smoke.

Then in a gas station in northern Indiana on a cold winter day, there it was. The sign. "Smoker Sign Up". Right in front of the tobacco section, right behind the cashier. "Smoker Sign Up." All you had to do was to go to a web site (I think it was smokersignup.com) and let them know what you like to smoke.

So all that hype, all that science, all that litigation, all those movies, all that money to stop something that is bad for you and…..you can still smoke. Heck, you are encouraged to smoke!! Let us know what you want, sign up here ladies and gentlemen, it’s okay.

When I saw that, I realized that at the heart of America is the idea of choice. Choosing to do whatever you want, even if it makes you very sick and can kill you, is as American as hot dogs, Chevrolet and apple pie. And that means that things like the pro-life movement are doomed to failure – or worse. With constitutional protection of the well-understood American right to freedom of choice in all things, the pro-lifers cannot succeed and their leaders, if they know this are fools or evil, and if they do not know this are incompetent. In America, people have the choice to hurt themselves, and to kill others. In America, the right to choose life and death is enshrined. In America, you can choose damnation just as equally or better than salvation. This is what Americans want, not thinking that it is really that serious a choice – heaven or hell, if it exists, is like the difference between vanilla and chocolate in their minds. A group of people like that is willing to play Russian roulette with their eternal souls. That’s not good.

Switch now away from the grime and smells of the gas station and thoughts of ice cream.

What is America best known for? Yes! Fast food. The only thing that is genuinely and organically American is fast food. But if you can’t get fast food in a fast food place, what does that say about America?

For 15 minutes I waited at a burger joint in a Midwestern town. For a burger. There was the non-moving line in which I had to stand while the girl (about 17) was trying to figure out how to make the cash register work. She was pimply faced, over weight and inarticulate. Then, there were six more overweight, pants wearing, pimply faced girmen (girls-women) moving about slowly behind the counters in the kitchen area. Not looking up, and hardly talking, with questions tinged with frustration occassionally issuing from under their dirty caps, it was not clear what they were or were not doing except that it made no difference as to the speed with which I got my food. My fast food. Actually, now that I think about it, it sort of reminded me of one of those fantasy movies with the battling groups of mythical creatures known as the "Urus" and the "Skekskies". Each of these creatures were grossly shaped things that moved slowly and awkwardly with their necks bent. That’s what these overweight fast-food restaurant workers looked like to me as they half shuffled, slowly bobbed and lethargically weaved at the fast-food restaurant.

If you can’t get fast food at a fast food joint in America, what’s going on? I suppose it means that America can no longer provide the one unique thing it has given the world. Now, in all fairness, when fast food was invented, it was pretty simple – you had a choice between three or four burgers, a half dozen drinks and that was it, buddy. With time, the number and types of sandwiches grew and a lot more was added to the menu like salads, and parfaits, and ice cream, etc. – all to accommodate some palate. Or, more properly, to get another niche in the market so as to boost profits.

But still. To make fast food, you have to do certain things. It takes intelligence (you have to be able to beat the cash register), it takes organization (you have to know what you are supposed to do), and it takes a sense of urgency. You have to want to be fast and so be proud in your work. All of this is based on a discipline that makes one learn and do things that they would not otherwise do. And at the basis of that discipline is virtue.

The overweight, ugly, pants-wearers have no virtue. They have no discipline. They have no sense of urgency. They are not fast. They have no pride in what they do because they view work as a punishment. They have forgotten their heritage and tradition that makes them uniquely American. So America cannot even provide fast food anymore.

And it was there, in the middle of Indiana, on a winter’s day, in a greasy, dirty slow moving fast food restaurant that I saw the end of America. Here, in the Heartland, I saw how America will finally come to cease to exist.

No one will care anymore.