Back in 2002, I was laid off from a corporate job along with about two dozen of my co-workers. This was six months after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. At no point did it occur to me to blame the subsequent financial challenges I had on George W. Bush.
Here’s how it sometimes works: major disaster, upheaval in our lives.
We just went through a global pandemic. I’m no economist and don’t pretend to understand some of the nuances of that field. But I have common sense. Supply chains, crops, sales, livelihoods, health … topsy turvy, chewed up and spit out. We’re in the residual period.
And guess what? Some of the corporations that bring us our groceries have rebounded and are making massive profits and not passing the savings down to us. Shock! Say it isn’t so.
In the meantime, we get to read/hear the economist brainiacs’ dissertations on why the economy is so good right now side by side with the “Biden sucks” crowd that thinks it’s his fault if they trip on the sidewalk let alone have to pay more for eggs. The facts get lost in the politics as most of us are busy trying to find creative ways to adjust to the cost of living.
I think the word greed is used too frequently these days, so we’ve become desensitized to it, but clearly we are feeling the effects of it now. It’s not enough for the big guns to turn a profit, it must be an astronomical one. The guy trying to run his restaurant in his town and turn a profit when butter and ketchup (and everything else) costs markedly more than before? If he’s still surviving, it’s nothing short of a miracle. Everything has been working against him the last four years.
I’ve read a lot about this that gets deep in the weeds of why and involves way more math than I’m up for. Politically it’s troubling. Still, I’m sticking with hope.
I remember being at a gathering a few years after Superstorm Sandy and talking to a woman whose husband’s construction business was thriving because of that disastrous storm. She attributed her newly remodeled kitchen to his escalation in work.
Makes me wonder — what sunshine might we get post-pandemic?
[Editorial Note: This is my fourth installment in a series I began in order to give my writing some flow after being in a healing phase from knee surgeries for a year (2023-24).]
