I Guess Swine Flew

Here’s a funny thing that happens to Christians. God decides to give you favor. But on the way, you run into a bureaucrat. And the bureaucrat says “no.” Then you persist, without doing anything immoral or obnoxious, and the bureaucrat loses, and you get what you were supposed to get. Or maybe the first time you hear from the bureaucrat is when he or she gives you something you had no idea you were getting. And later you find out it was an error. Like the error that set Corrie ten Boom free from a death camp.

Maybe you’re being considered for a promotion. Maybe you’re up for parole. Maybe you’re on Schindler’s List. God decides you’re going to get something, but you have to go through a bureaucrat in order to see it happen.

Bureaucrats are often bad news. Think about it. Pontius Pilate. Both Herods. Pharaoh. Hitler and the Nazis. Stalin, Mao, Castro, all the other Communist dictators, and their stooges. Haman. Paul, before he fell on the road to Damascus. The Romans who martyred early Christians. Maybe the problem is that bureaucrats work for the god of this world. They’re sometimes like his dirty little angels, and they don’t know it.

Today I went to get a swine flu shot. I called the feds, and they said I qualified because I’m helping my sister, who currently has no immune system to speak of. I got down to the health department building, and there was a lady guarding the door, which is a very common thing for bureaucrats to do. Very often, the little person at the door–who makes minimum wage–can control your fate on a whim. I told her I needed the shot because I was helping care for a cancer patient. She looked through the papers in front of her, and she said constipation was not on the list of qualifications. Her English was so bad, I could not make her understand the difference between “constipation” and “cancer patient.”

I asked her for someone who spoke better English. You can’t be shy about that in Miami. It makes people mad, but if they don’t speak English, they have no right to expect Americans to deal with them. People need to do business, and to do business, communication is essential. You shouldn’t be ashamed to ask for someone who understands you.

She took me to a nurse. I learned something interesting. You can be a registered nurse in the United States, with the power to do things that can determine whether a person lives or dies (including dispensing medicine with English labels) without being able to understand English. Neither one of them understood a thing I said. Instead of taking me to a person who spoke English, the lady from the door apparently took me to the person she hung out with the most, and naturally, this was a person who shared her impairment.

I told the second lady I wanted to talk to someone who spoke English. She took me to another nurse. All three of these ladies were Hispanic, but only the third one had not permitted that to interfere with learning the language of her country of residence. I explained my situation to her, and she went and argued with the lady at the front door, and the door lady reluctantly caved in, and I got my shot. From a fourth Hispanic lady, whose English was fine.

I’ll bet the door lady is still mad. I was very polite to all of them, but a certain type of bureaucrat hates to lose, regardless of how little it means to them and how much it means to you. This is one of the laws of bureaucracy. Remember what they told Oskar Schindler when he rescued Itzhak Stern from the death train. “It makes no difference to us, you understand. This one, that one. It’s the inconvenience to the list. It’s the paperwork.” Half an hour of paperwork trumps human life, in the bureaucrat mind. Remember the Vogons.

I get the flu, I give it to my sister, that’s the end of her…but the lady at the door stood up to the Anglo with constipation. That’s how it would have gone. She would never even have known what she had done to us. And she thought she was doing the right thing. Nazis and Communists are examples of bureaucrats, but most bureaucrats are just regular people trying to do their jobs. I am not trying to suggest the first two ladies were evil. I have no reason to think they didn’t mean well.

I got the shot. Now all I have to do is stay flu-free for ten days so it gets a chance to work.