The CVS on Quaker Lane in Alexandria, scene of many ethics adventures…
I am still at war with CVS, which has so far ducked all of my efforts to seek an appropriate response for our local branch’s unethical treatment of a 30-year regular customer (me) last year. I still haven’t gotten around to moving all of my drug prescriptions to Walgreen’s, Harris Teeter or Safeway, however, so yesterday I was once again involved in a long, complicated mess regarding the filling of one of my more crucial pharmaceutical needs. (My CVS doesn’t do well with its pharmacy service either, especially since it used the Wuhan freakout to justify cutting staff down below a minimum level.)
Luckily, I was dealing with my favorite member of the current staff, a smart, young African-American assistant pharmacist with superb interpersonal skills. In the course of our discussion, I mentioned that most of the stores were closed (this is Northern Virginia) since the state was one of those making the Monday after Juneteenth’s arrival on a Sunday a holiday.
She had no idea what I was talking about.
“What,” she asked, “is Juneteenth?” I quickly explained the whole story, as she looked at me with a quizzical expression. “I never heard of any of that,” she said. “They certainly didn’t teach it in school. And it’s a national holiday? Weird.”
Indeed.
Observations:
- Further illustrating what a contrived, Black Lives Matter-pandering, George Floyd Freakout-triggered holiday Juneteenth is, we have the evidence of a well-educated Virginia woman who would seem to be a prime candidate to appreciate the new holiday the missing the fact of its existence, as well as why it exists.
- How many other major holidays commemorated something so many Americans didn’t know or care about when the holiday debutted? My guess, without doing detailed research: none. Indeed, none even close.
- Unless we adopt the politically correct mandate that nothing and no one in the entire remarkable history of the US were as significant and important as the late arrival in a single state of the news that that slavery had been abolished, then we must conclude that the national priorities illustrated by our choice of holidays is distorted and incoherent.
- The assistant pharmacist thanked me for my quick history lesson. My extemporaneous explication of Juneteenth, I must conclude, was far better and more concise than Vice President Kamala Harris’s botched attempt yesterday, and she has a stable of writers and advisors. This is, or should be, embarrassing to the Veep, since I am a white guy with minimal interest in the historical episode, while Harris is black (sort of) and only has her job on the dubious theory that being black makes her especially qualified to be Vice-President. Of course, I would also be a better VP than Harris. So would my favorite CVS staffer. So, in all likelihood, would you.
- I wonder what will be the tipping point when a substantial majority of the U.S. population finally decides that that nation’s policies, laws, priorities and ethical principles have been distorted and dominated by a continually troubled segment of society that makes up less than 20% of the whole, and whose leaders insist that the segment take little or no responsibility for its entrenched pathologies and problems? It has to happen eventually, doesn’t it? By the time it does, however, we may have holidays celebrating the birthdays of Jackie Robinson, Crispus Attucks, Barack Obama, Thurgood Marshall, George Floyd and Harriet Tubman, the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment, and, oh I don’t know, maybe the acquittal of O.J. Simpson.
Ethics Alarms 
Closing CVS? I think in NJ they close on Thanksgiving and Christmas and that’s it. In the City here, there was pressure for everyone to turn out and march for reparations, police reform, et al. I was told privately I was exempt, though, since this was a black thing and white allies were neither needed nor wanted. In the meantime they renamed Washington Park Harriet Tubman Square. Not that HT isn’t worth honoring, but at the expense of Washington? Hmmmm.
Not CVS. I was chatting with her about other commercial establishments. Our CVS was open on Christmas.
Ahhh gotcha. I misunderstood. Nah, around here most stores were open. Some were even running sales.
My wife and I were talking about the fact that, unlike on every other such holiday, our local Monday trash pickup wasn’t delayed a day. Her comment: “Well, we’re in Texas. Sometimes the news takes longer to reach here.”
Here in Indiana, it wasn’t delayed either.
Curmie’s wife has an excellent sense of humor; no small thing.
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“[the] nation’s policies, laws, priorities and ethical principles have been distorted and dominated by a continually troubled segment of society that makes up less than 20% of the whole, and whose leaders insist that the segment take little or no responsibility for its entrenched pathologies and problems?”
Never heard it put so succinctly. Pathologies ~~~> Yes.
That troubled segment are a bunch of myopic spoiled crybabies acting out who were poorly raised but well propagandized and now society must contend with their awful and not infrequent violent behavior but so far collectively is doing everything wrong.
Two days ago, a Facebook Memory for my law firm popped up commemorating Juneteenth.
It was a memory from 2017, so I guess I was ahead of the curve.
I do not know when I first became acquainted with it, but it was obviously before 2017.
As for its historical value, I have recently been reading some WPA-financed slave memoirs. I wrote about them in a comment here earlier in the year. One of those accounts mentioned a Juneteenth celebration, so, it has been a thing since the 30’s, at least.
While I am fine with Juneteenth as an unofficial holiday, like St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo, I am not sure what I think of it as a national holiday. There is the pandering aspect. There is the incoherence of it (it didn’t end slavery, but it fulfilled the Emancipation Proclamation, but we can’t use that date (January 1), and the date of the 15th Amendment seems an odd “holiday,” as only the Fourth of July celebrates a legal/political act (right?).
While I posted a commemoration of Juneteenth on our firm’s Facebook page in 2017, I did not share that memory last Sunday, because it seemed like it WOULD be pandering.
Or, I am just not one to follow the crowd.
-Jut
Regarding the tipping point on the current behavior of thirteen percent of the population: A friend and client, an architect and shopping center developer, highly educated, with an architecture degree from the University of Oklahoma, said to me of the then current state of racial affairs in the mid 1980s, “If I’d known you were going to be such a problem, I’d have picked my own damned cotton.” Obviously, a breathtakingly nasty thing to have said even forty years ago, but at some point, the racial grievance industry is going to overplay the hand they think they’re holding.
I avoid CVS like the plague. Their stores are drastically under-staffed and unclean to the point of shabbiness. Obviously, a conscious corporate decision. And their prices are higher than even Walgreens prices. Amazingly, Mrs. OB and I have found the pharmacists (and their staffs) at, of all places, Walmart, the most professional and helpful and pleasant by a long shot.
Then there is this:
jvb
In an effort to out-Balkanize DC, the mayor of New Orleans squandered $7.2 mil for Juneteenth “art”, including the installation of a giant afro-pick with a clenched fist handle:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FVeo8cmVIAIoUtR?format=jpg&name=small
Apparently, many black people dislike it. Can you imagine what the reaction would be if a white mayor had sponsored it?
“…By the time it does, however, we may have holidays celebrating the birthdays of Jackie Robinson, Crispus Attucks, Barack Obama, Thurgood Marshall, George Floyd and Harriet Tubman, the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment, and, oh I don’t know, maybe the acquittal of O.J. Simpson.”
Despite the irony, I’d think Clarence Thomas, J, ought to be high up in that mix; certainly on a par with Thurgood Marshall.
MB
There isn’t even any mention of Thomas in the Africa-American History Museum here in D.C. He’s officially a pariah, because you aren’t really black unless you toe the perpetual victim line.