how mama voted one day

Our neighborhood post office is a small hold-over from the previous regime. The lines are always at least twenty-minutes long and the service at best mediocre.

While I was standing at the post office window, finally getting my first U.S. Presidential election absentee ballot weighed and stamped, a man in one of the other queues began to shout obscenities at the top of his lungs: "You fu**ing bastard!!! It's because of you that I've been stuck here for two hours....!!!!"

The recipient of this pitiful caricature-of-a-man's venom was an old gentleman standing meekly with his seventy-something-year-old wife at the front of the line, dealing with a clerk at the window. True, the old man had been there for quite some time, but he was clearly being helped.

I won't repeat what the insults were, but let me assure you, they were all vile. None of the fifty or so customers said anything to him or each other. Ho, hum, just another day at the post office.

I told the clerk who was weighing my letter that they had some rude customers. He responded with: "You know, that is nothing out of the ordinary."

I took on the mission of taming the beast single-handedly, telling the a-hole (without using that word) to calm down and not be so rude. That seemed to shut him up, but what the heck do I know since soon thereafter I left for home, reeling from the adrenaline rush stemming not from sending in my vote for the first time like I had hoped, but from speaking up against an injustice at my neighborhood post office.