Waiting Impatiently
Terry H. Schwadron
Sept 26, 2024
Waiting is our imposed, if uncomfortable habit, whether for promised services or expected deliveries or even for an accurate update on when we might see an end to the wait.
It is making us angry.
Of course, this likely has been true since the start of time, but it all seems heightened in an era of instant communications, possibilities and drone-delivered deliveries.
Waiting makes us impatient, and too often ready to cut corners or eliminate regulations or speed while weaving among slower highway drivers, tossing aside communal safety to satisfy ego.
Our recognized impatience is the prompt for endless new business start-ups that over-promise on instant or convenience-based home deliveries and on extra-fast, personalized routes to success in the marketplace.
Our societal impatience is so strong that we go to the opposite attitude, demanding immediate results. We even now expect a running count every week on who’s ahead in our presidential politics — despite different results by the tiniest margins each. Indeed, I don’t know anyone willing to spend a half-hour on the phone with a stranger to discuss the pending vote. But the bigger truth is that we really need only wait a few more weeks, and we’ll know.
You wouldn’t think we need weekly polling to reflect back that we are a deeply divided country on all sorts of issues — including impatience.
To listen to the political chatter, Inflation is a condition that should simply disappear overnight with a policy promise or two, and poverty, hunger, homelessness and lousy education somehow are only a slogan away from resolution.
Nope, among all else, reason might remind us that complicated social problems require creativity, hard work and time.
Hours for Paperwork
We visited with our government bureaucracy one day this week, standing in lines, then waiting for what turned into multiple interviews at our local Social Security office. Even with service tickets, it was only hours later that we finally were able to clear a tiny paperwork snafu affecting benefits — despite multiple calls and re-routings through seldom-helpful phone trees and electronic contacts.
We all joke about long visits to motor vehicle departments and complex government forms dictated by compliance with legal requirements.
Setting oneself up for success as a citizen seems to require commitment — whether as a medical patient, an insurance claimant or a voter.
The relentless efforts in red states, for example, to limit voting places, voter registration and just plain voting are making our basic citizenship into heroics for many. Serving as an Election Day poll worker is now a guaranteed invitation to harassment in a growing number of districts.
The same is true for our airports, where we all have agreed to show up hours early to stand in multiple lines, to board, and to hope that this flight takes off in time to meet the now-required second flight from the nearest hub city.
It’s true at the supermarket, the drug store, the retailers where cutbacks of staff all but mandate waits just to pay and get on with your day. We treat going to the store as a detour plan to avoid traffic jams — or just turn to online orders for which we also wait.
Debating Efficiency?
Maybe we’re arguing about the wrong principles with our businesses and politics. Maybe the best businesses are those that can just provide the services and goods that they promise in an efficient manner.
Maybe we should be demanding that our elected politicians should be there to make systems work, not to gum them up over anger over states’ rights or partisan points of view.
Take immigration. The strongest arguments, which all stretch credulity, insist on “closing the border” and mass deportations on the one side, and more humanitarian outlooks that leave open the charge of having created an “open” border that can’t stop criminals or drugs or mass numbers of migrants. Now Donald Trump is talking about deporting legal immigrants, as if that is an acceptable thing to do.
Immigration policy today is a prime example of impatience for those tired of waiting — on all sides.
The reality is somewhere in and among all of those slogans, but relies on a patient examination of fact — and of sizing the number of border agents, courts, and services to match an ever-increasing migrant population. Just maybe the answer is not all about policing the border, but rather in figuring out what would make it work.
There are solutions out there, even imperfect solutions. The Affordable Care Act could work better but tens of millions denied health care now have it. For all the fuss over mandates, Covid vaccines did help. Broken bridges have been fixed, and people have rebuilt after wildfires and hurricanes. The work takes time and patience.
I’m waiting impatiently for the noise to stop and for the solutions to peace, security, climate, high prices and more to be under way.
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