So, the past few days have been an interesting interplay of "rackets." By racket, I don't mean the thing used to bounce a tennis ball across the room or the type of noises made in the middle of the night by my insomniac neighbor. No. By racket, I mean the type of profiteering that rips people off; the racket of raking in undeserved amounts of money.
My two case-in-points of this lovely November week are 1) the racketing by immigration lawyers and 2) the photo-offering services in pharmacies.
In the first case, I can't seem to find a lawyer who will look over a visa package we've been working on for the past two weeks. Now, all we need is a little lawyering and boo-boo catching. After working so long on it—and pretty much completing it—it would be nice to have a lawyer look it over and see if we did anything wrong, and pay them an amount for their work accordingly. For some reason, this seems like an impossible task. I can't find one... ...so far, in calling Google search results for immigration lawyers in Nashville, all I get are receptionists that say their law office only does the entire job themselves. It’s either pay for the whole thing or nothing. Where are the lawyers that actually meet the needs of their clients? Where are the ones that can do what is needed?
Next, my racket-interception took me into the realm of passport photos. In putting together the USCIS package, it turns out that we need 7 passport photos. We have our own nicely shot photos, shot to USCIS guidelines, (http://travel.state.gov/passport/guide/guide_2081.html), which we took on a thumb drive to several pharmacies with photo kiosk servicing. In our first pharmacy, a CVS, we're told that they can either take the passport photo for us and print it for $7.99, or we can use the kiosk with no further help from them. We opt for the kiosk and load in our photo, and we're able to make several 4x6" sheets, with each containing six 2"x2" passport photos--this was all of 29 cents per sheet, which is what we expected. Since the background printed out a little too grey and since the kiosk printed a funny line down one of the prints, we thought we'd take another round of pictures and come back for reprinting. In returning that evening, the kiosk was no longer printing, so we opted to try a RiteAid not too far away. In RiteAid, we were told that passport and ID photos of any kind are all $7.99, so we headed to a nearby Walgreen's. In Walgreen's, we again found the same $7.99 default passport pricing, as well as in a different CVS that we tried later that evening. So, all in all, there's only one place we can take a photo, print it out on 4x6" paper, and get 4x6" pricing--the first CVS.
Aside from that first, lone CVS, the passport printing is a huge racket. Why can’t I go into a store and pay a simple, standard, and fair price for a 4”x6” print. Whether it's one photo or six photos on that 4”x6” print is irrelevant--they are both the same "product" when printed. Seriously, regardless whether the printer is printing one, six, or a hundred pictures on that 4x6 paper, it’s still the same ink and paper. So, how do they justify such a ridiculous difference in pricing? Would it be right to sell one carton of milk for 29 cents and another carton, containing the exact same milk and a slightly different printout, for 8 dollars? Makes me wonder what the $7-plus dollar markup is for in the case of these photos—is this really just? We need prices that more accurately represent a product’s actual value.
During one of the 13 hour hauls from Newark DE to Nashville, I thought that I'd keep myself entertained by alternating between some of my audiobooks and local talk-radio channels. Reaching my hand across to the passenger seat's visor to rifle through my CD collection, I happened to pick up the Dalai Lama's "Ethics for a New Millennium" disc. Driving through the traffic-laden DC area, the construction and overly populated roads fell by the wayside, as I listened to His Holiness' calm and optimism for peace for future generations. His visions of world unity got me past Roanoke, and into the less traveled portions of Virginia, where I used the lull in mood and traffic to change to a local radio station.
In the midst of a sentence urging more work by the UN, I put my hand over the radio, and "pressed" the AM button. The calm, optimistic, visionary talk was replaced by the voice of an angry woman. "Sustainability?" The woman's deep, angry voice said incredulously. "*They* dare to say the word sustainability? Well, I tell you something, folks. *They* don't know the meaning of sustainability."The angry woman then went on to say that "*They...*" [a term which I gathered meant the Obama administration] "...*They* say that we cannot live as well as the previous generation. That's right. *They* say that our parents will have lived better than us, and that we won't do as well as they did."
Still angry, the woman said "Well, I tell you something. That's not sustainable. I'll tell you what sustainable is. Freedom is sustainable. Our forefathers, in founding this great land, they worked hard so that we could have it better. That's what America is about, folks. That's what sustainability is about--it's about freedom so that we do better."
In bafflement, I pressed the scan button to see if I could get a different station. Maybe one that knew the word "sustainable" as I knew it--not as a conflictor of freedom. The radio picked up a frequency broadcasting the events of a Tea Party in the Capitol. As I listen, I'm told that people were protesting Obama, holding signs calling him a socialist and picturing Hitler next to him.
Further befuddled, I wondered how people thought Hitler as a socialist. Did they even read Marx? Did they know "socialism" as something different than what I've learned in school? And, how does Hitler even compare to Obama?
All of this had me thinking that, while we all want a common better, we lack a commonality in our understanding of common words: sustainable, socialism, Nazism, progressive, freedom, taxes... I'm not sure how this got to be, and why what incites one can calm another. With such common ideals for good, how can we be so different?
Maybe before getting to the ethics of things, we need a little more etymology in our diet. Any radio stations listening?
