Out of Five
About 25 years ago, when we were college age, my friend decided to pop into a drug store and buy a pack of gum.
Once inside, he found the gum of his choice, then waited in line for a minute or so until he was called to come forward and transact by the young woman manning the cash register.
“How can I help you?” she asked.
“Just this,” he replied, plopping the gum down on the counter.
She rang the item up and said, “That is seventy-five cents, please.”
He pulled a five dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to her.
“Okay, out of five,” she said aloud while punching numbers into the cash register, while my friend passed the time as you did before cell phones, by looking at magazine covers here, the wall of cigarettes there, and on and on.
Then he looked up and was shocked to see that the cashier was staring angrily at him, thoroughly annoyed, still holding the five dollar bill.
“Out of five?” she demanded.
At first confused, he recovered quickly and replied to her harsh entreaty.
“Yes,” he said. “Out of five”. (This was a time before WTF was invented but that is what he was thinking and how he intonated his response.)
My friend walked out of the store and very soon was telling me about his bizarre transaction in which this employee became miffed when he failed to engage in a verbal validation process which had customarily only been part of the retail worker’s monologue and never required input from the customer.
Her script, in its entirety should be something like:
“How can I help you?”
“That is seventy-five cents, please.”
“Okay, out of five.”
“Your change is (counts off the ones) one, two, three, four dollars and twenty-five cents. Have a good day.”
But not on that day in nineteen ninety-something.
This cashier demanded that my friend opt in to her world in which the currency verification dance was everything. His participation was mandatory. If he did not partake with immaculate compliance the entire transaction would come to a grinding halt and she would grow angry.
And angry she did grow.
I bring all of this up - and work with me here - because what was a bizarre, unpleasant and noteworthy one-off from many years ago is now commonplace.
Today we are bullied and cajoled by people and institutions which demand of us compliance whether we like it or not. We are expected to take part in whatever nonsense cultural construct they are preaching and our reluctance to do so will not simply result in a failed gum purchase, it will define us an adversary of good.
For instance, March is International Women’s Month.
I don’t know what that is and I don’t want to know.
What I did discover, though, is that many people present the celebration as “International Womxn’s Month.”
The “E” is sucked right out of the word so that “men” ceases to exist in the second syllable of “women,” I mean “womxn.”
“Women” is linguistic sexism and a reminder of patriarchal oppression.
The fact that the word cannot be pronounced is of little importance, like most dumb woke-ology it is all about the symbolism or something.
I’m not opting in and neither should you. Thankfully there is some progressive infighting on the matter so the movement has not yet grown enough to carry with it consequences for noncompliance.
Confessing your “privilege” is a far more required exercise, certainly in academia and more recently in corporations where it is routinely encouraged and increasingly mandated that employees discuss it.
I was once in a meeting that was supposedly about a mundane procedural work topic but then suddenly a guy bounded into the room to explain to us how problematic our privilege was. He was hired to lecture us about our implicit malevolence and attempted to solicit from us examples of how we might tamp down our perniciousness.
Nobody said a thing. Some were probably confused by management’s social justice shell game but others, like me, refused to engage with the absurdity.
Last summer, well-meaning white Americans in tony suburbs everywhere turned out for Black Lives Matter rallies. They giddily changed their social media avatars to social justice symbols, plunked down BLM yard signs on their lawns and took selfies while taking a knee and - believe it or not - doing the black power symbol, fists in the air.
Instagram is filled with such images and millions of Americans are engaged in self flagellation over a history of racial injustice for which few if any of them bear any responsibility. All this because they were guilted into engaging in a role playing exercise based on the assumption that until last year, they had no regard for an entire race of people.
It was transactional. The grifters gained wealth and power and the white suburbians got to enjoy the thrill of confessing to sinful crimes which would allow them the opportunity to embark on a “racial reckoning” mission which in turn would put them on the road to redemption and end in total salvation.
There’s a lawn sign for that, too.
Wacky contrivances and distortions of reality should be ignored at every turn and never validated. The evangelists of these grifts are here to grift and are not programmed to ever stop grifting.
But if we call them out as the hustlers they are they will move along and slink off to find another victim.
We must not dance with them. It was funny when the stakes were gum but today the cultural coercion is often costly, as we’ve all witnessed.
So that is where I’m at. That is the challenge. There is a lot of stupid happening all around us now. I think it will pass as long as we don’t water the weeds.
I do wonder what happened to the “out of five” cashier once debit cards replaced cash. She may have cunningly found a way to insert herself in that process, too, but self-service options would surely have been the end of her reign.
That drug store was in Cleveland Circle in Boston near Boston College. Say hello if you see her and please let her know we have never forgotten her. Also, please wish her a happy Womxn’s Month.