Frosted 7 comments

By A.G. Harmon

It’s hard to make sense while in the midst of an overwhelming rage. It’s even harder when there’s no particular thing to rage against. The nicest thing our enemies can do for us is to provide a face for us to punch, a name for us to call out. To work our destruction from within the cowardly mists of anonymity evidences a real depravity, one that doesn’t even care enough about what it’s doing that it needs or wants to see us destroyed.

On a Friday afternoon, someone close to me received a letter from the U.S. Government (why is it always a Friday afternoon when such things happen? Right when there’s no time to rectify a mistake and two full days to worry about the consequences?). The letter came innocuously enough, with no particular urgency; it might’ve been one of those missives sent, at enormous taxpayer expense, to let us know how destitute we’ll be when we reach retirement age.

But the letter inside was anything but innocuous; with casual, curt nonchalance, the unsigned notice informed the recipient that the government had decided to cut off the benefits she’d been receiving after the death of her husband a few years back. This action would take effect immediately. The measure was being taken, the letter went on to say, because her sixteen year-old daughter had recently married and the agency had not been told. If there was some mistake, the recipient was to download a form from a website, fill it in, and return it immediately.

Of course, the trouble with all this is that the sixteen year-old daughter has not gotten married. She’s in high school, with a perfect grade point average, was just elected the student body president, and is as close to a model child as any that walks the earth.

How this unparalleled foolishness got started, who can say—but as a testament to our swollen, bloviated government’s ability to make such mistakes—I doubt anyone bothering to read this post would be surprised that it did, and does, happen regularly.

But that was only the beginning of the nightmare. The form that the letter specifically referred to could not be downloaded from the site; in addition, she was told that no agency office could or would provide the form to her except the one in her home county. When called, the “hotline” number of that office rang incessantly; no one answered the phone after—and I’m not kidding—twenty calls.

So canceling all plans, my friend took her children and drove to the office itself. The holding room, like a tank for suspected detainees, was full of people with similar problems. Except unlike her—a woman relatively well off, with several advanced degrees—most of the folks were either elderly people or immigrants, without the education or temerity to navigate through the labyrinthine system that had visited some mindless indiscriminate harm upon them.

These people were utterly dependant on checks cut off too soon because of some transposed birth date, some thumbless mis-entry of a name. Granted, there are instances of fraud at times, but the object of my tirade is against the treatment of those who have been the victim of a mistake.

For through a bank of frosted windows—manned by only one or two people, despite ten or more available that who were too busy joking and drinking coffee to work—the government’s business was done.

When my friend finally got to a window and explained her problem, the bureaucrat only laughed. He had never heard of the form before, did not know how to access it, and wanted to how she could prove that her child wasn’t married. He sent her to another person, who said she was leaving work early and slammed down her frosted window.

After several more tries, and a two and a half hour wait (never did more than one or two workers mind the windows at a time), she was told that the office would write a letter in lieu of the mysterious form, but that there were no assurances that it would work, and it would be “weeks and weeks” before she got any response. When she asked for a name to contact, or one of their own names to follow up with, all refused. They did not give out their names as a matter of policy, she was told, with a wry smile. She could call the phone number on the form to follow up—the one that nobody answers.

In Hobbes’ Leviathan, the philosopher speaks of the forces of nature that make life fearful, brutish, and short. We need government to hold such miseries at bay, he said. But what can be made of a world in which the faceless and nameless wreak havoc from behind frosted windows, in the name of the state—in which responsibility is denied, and all complaints forwarded to only another set of frosted windows, a thousand miles away—in which the powerless dare not object to intolerable rudeness and epic incompetency out of fear that they’ll antagonize the bloated, unnamed thing into dealing them an even worse blow?

God, how I long for the decency of a Goliath, who would at least provide me a head at which to aim my slingshot.