Chicken shit

I’m sick of the amount of chicken shit going on.

This feels like a chicken shit office. No one seems to be doing any work. No one seems motivated to do anything. My own clients rebel against me. When I ask for help getting things done, there’s always something more important that someone else is doing that takes priority. The result is I’m neck deep in paperwork, behind the 8-ball on all my cases, and no one but me gives a damn. What seems to matter to the Great Man is dealing with a chicken shit vendor dispute, offering a chicken shit service that we should have never subscribed to. Such new cases as I do get seem to be getting in are big piles of chicken shit on top of that.

There aren’t even any plastic spoons since no one seemed to notice that the spoons were running out last week, with the result that I’m eating yogurt with a fork because that’s the only utensil anywhere.

Of course, there is plenty more chicken shit going on, too. I’m frustrated with chicken-shit work from my students. They want to argue about their chicken shit opinions about chicken shit political issues which have nothing to do with what I’m trying to teach. They just want a degree to be handed to them, with no work, no learning, and no criticism. Anything less than a perfect score, every week, is somehow my fault.

And here’s the smelliest pile of guano out there. It’s been a week since Hurricane Katrina made landfall and there has been a chicken shit response to it — at all levels of government, municipal, state, and federal. I heard an editorial on NPR today indicating that a response to a disaster is a complex, difficult thing and we should cut the relief effort workers some slack. I’m sure that’s true, but there can be no justification for letting a million people live hip-deep in filth and anarchy when they are supposed to be citizens of the richest, most technologically advanced, country in the world, the country with the most infrastructure and the most resources at its disposal. If what happened in Louisiana had happened anywhere else in the world, we would call it a “failed state” and debate about whether the UN needs to come in and help restructure things.

And here’s the thing about it. Once the water levels drop and you can see the streets again, we’ll get a body count, be astonished, and mad for a while that the levees could have been built taller and stronger but weren’t. And there will be some desultory finger-pointing about that. But then people will start rebuilding their city again — still below sea level, still right underneath a lake — and everyone is going to forget all about this and nothing will change. This picture to the right is from the Red River Flood of 1997 — a whole city (Grand Forks) got taken out then, too. Have the levees and dams been rebuilt any better? Have the buildings and houses been relocated to a place that makes sense? Has anyone else, even in Grand Forks, done anything more than say, “I wonder whatever happened to all them sandbags?”

There’s just way too much half-assed, chicken-shit, I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude out there. And the thing is, it’s contagious. The more I bang my head up against it, the more I stop caring myself.