Please, Just Live With It

In the New York apartment where I live, a vending machine on the first floor sells bottled water for $1.50. I put in the money and pressed the button for water one day, and six bottles crashed down the machine. I said to the building manager, “there is something wrong with the vending machine,” but the manager told me to “just keep the water.” I pointed out that someone should fix the vending machine, only to hear a lazy “OK” in response.

After two months, the vending machine still squirts out six bottles of water for $1.50. Local residents now take a bag to conveniently haul six water bottles when they go to the vending machine. Although we asked the manger to fix the vending machine, we all have become used to the “illicit gain.”

A post office nearby our house has had a sign that reads “no credit cards accepted” for three days. An employee at the post office told me that the Internet is not working and the computers are inoperative. I visited the post office four days in a row because I had an important document to send to South Korea. An employee at the post office told me every day that the “international courier service is currently unavailable,” and I questioned the employee on when the Internet would be fixed. The employee calmly replied, “Why don’t you go to a different post office?”

One of the most common signs you see in New York subway stations is “report suspicious objects.” Awareness of terror threats against subway systems has spiked since 9/11 and the New York Police Department has been aggressively asking the public to immediately report unattended bags. However, there is no way to “immediately” report suspicious objects in New York subway because cell phones do not get reception in subways. New York City recently announced that it installed cell phone transmitters in four out of 468 New York subway stations, yet calls still do not work well in those stations.

A New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, published a book in September titled “That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.” In his book, he references an escalator that was under construction for two years in a Washington, D.C., Metro station and lamented that “at rush hour, this was creating a huge mess.” He was most disturbed that the locals “have sort of gotten used to it.”

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations that have been spreading in the past month target “the greed of the top 1 percent.” There are multiple “not working” lights glaring in American society: extreme income inequality, the worsening unemployment rate for young professionals, the two endless wars abroad and the rising Chinese economy threatening the U.S. As a correspondent in the U.S., I see that America these days does not fix broken things. Instead, society demands that you get used to inconveniences. A broken vending machine or a broken escalator may be fine; however, neglecting deeply-rooted problems such as the national debt or unemployment for the young will pose significant problems for the country in the future.

The demonstrators criticize that the wealthy and the politicians are busy satisfying their own greed and not leading the country. If America’s 1 percent had invested their influence and capital to resolve various problems that are long overdue, the ire of the “angry 99 percent” may not have spread as quickly.