NRFU is finally over, and I must say it’s a relief. Towards the end it was getting a bit frustrating. Another operation is coming up, and I won’t have more than a few days of downtime, but I’ll use that to reflect on something NRFU taught me: People are still scared of the government.
There’s an important distinction to make here – I don’t mean that people do not trust the government, or that they don’t have any faith in it getting things right, but I mean that people are actually scared of the government. Even after Hollywood abandoned the Top Secret Government Agency for the vigilante movies of the late aughts, because the very thought of the government pulling off something extremely complicated and secretive was too much to ask for the audience’s suspension of disbelief, people still fear the feds.
I find this incredibly interesting, but maybe it has always been this way. And I’m by no means interacting with a perfect cross section of Americans – these are the people who didn’t send in their Census for one reason or another. I guess I don’t really know if this is a popular sentiment, but it is out there.
I also got to learn a bit about bureaucracy from the inside. This reaffirmed some of my assumptions, and shed some light on things I didn’t know I didn’t know. In the field, we would have a running joke about the incompetence of the people at our LCO, but after many visits to the Office, I began to realize it was just a mutual misunderstanding that stemmed from the very set of rules that tied us all together. Bureaucracy itself is the problem, not the people inside of it. Interesting.