There's much dooming and glooming about the current political and economic landscape for a variety of reasons. Inflation, congressional gridlock among them.
Well, I tend not to panic over any individual circumstance or event, but I've begun to wonder.
I live out in the country, right? Miles from anything. We don't have home mail delivery, have to go to the post office to pick up mail. Electricity and natural gas service is available but costly. In fact, the gas association has raised our monthly bill by 80% because they anticipate their costs for gas going up that much. They'll make an adjustment up or down next June. Meanwhile we pay.
Gasoline prices went up from just under $2.00 a gallon all last year to almost $3.50 for a while, then inched back down. Yesterday, I think the posted price was $3.25, and in town it's down to about $3.00.
Food prices have increased a lot at our local-ish grocery store, up 30% last year on average, and another 25% this year. Some shelves have been bare since the start of the pandemic. Supplies don't arrive. When they do, they are less than ordered.
The local-ish Walmart in the next town over burned a couple of weeks ago (suspected arson) and there is no date certain for reopening. There is a kind of panic over it because their pharmacy is closed, and patients have few options. The pharmacy closest to us closed just before the fire at Walmart and my prescriptions were transferred to a supermarket pharmacy I've never used. So were a lot of the Walmart pharmacy's prescriptions. I've heard that service is terrible to say the least. This is literally thousands of patients added all at once.
In fact, Walmart had become a kind of regional supply depot, and without it, the surviving local businesses are strapped. They don't have the personnel or supplies to meet the local demand, and for some things you will have to go into Albuquerque -- which is quite a distance if you're shopping.
I wish I could say online ordering is reliable. It's not. If you need something and you order it online, be prepared to wait, weeks in many cases, or be prepared to be told it's not available -- after you order.
It's a crapshoot.
People aren't panicking yet, but there is a lot of tension. Out here we're used to making do and doing without, so the tension isn't as high as it might otherwise be (except among some of the elderly who are very worried about getting their prescriptions.) But I went into town (Albuquerque) to try to stock up on cat food (a precious commodity and sometimes hard to get out here) and tensions were high. Of course it's holiday season, and that's always tough for many people, but this seemed tougher than usual.
I see that some of the media is deliberately ginning up the tension, too. They're running false stories about inflation, for example, saying that prices for essentials have more than doubled in the past year, gas prices are through the roof, so on and so forth. It's not true, but people feel like it is, partly because that's what they hear on the "news" and partly because they are paying more. Shortages are flogged constantly, but from our perspective out here nothing really essential is in short supply. What is in short supply we've been doing without for a long time and probably don't need.
But... this is "ratcheting." Things are getting harder and harder to get, and prices are going higher and higher. The pandemic is not abating but is coming in wave after wave. Illness and deaths continue to mount, and as medical care and medications are harder to get, people are "falling through the cracks."
I've speculated that the death toll as a consequence of the pandemic -- both from Covid and from neglect of other illnesses -- has easily topped 1,000,000 in this country, god knows how many world-wide.
Personnel to work in various low-paid and poorly paid positions are scarce. Employers have resisted raising wages, but they have no choice if they plan to continue operating. Some of course won't.
Thee paradigm is still shifting but we're entering uncharted social, political and economic territory.
Meanwhile, authoritarians of all stripes are marshaling their forces.
No comments:
Post a Comment