It's the brink of summer, time for taking road trips or going four-wheeling or otherwise making the most of the short period of gorgeous weather that is our reward for getting through the long winters.
Or maybe not.
Because you see, one of the many annoying features of this summer is that here in Maine, the “cheap stuff” at the gas station has crept to just a few cents under $4 (at least as I write this) and is over $4 in some places. And your road trips and four-wheeling are going to cost you more as a result. So is topping off that oil tank in your home.
If you think the pain stops there, think again.
It isn’t your imagination that going to the grocery store costs more. You didn’t grab too many impulse items; you’re just getting hit with the higher cost of producing and shipping food across the country — and the world. As my widower father who barely cooks complained to me, that cheap no-name white bread he eats back in the Midwest is now $2 a loaf; just a few years ago it was two loaves for a buck. Don’t even get me started on my own bread costs these days, because I shoot for whole grains, no corn syrup, and, ideally, locally produced. If I get away with less than $5 a loaf, I consider myself fortunate.
We are on the verge of something that will change the very foundation and fabric of this great country. In America, we pride ourselves on a strong work ethic and the typical Horatio Alger story of pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps. Never mind that this has always been a bit of a falsehood, since some folks never had any straps to pull up thanks to lack of resources, lack of education, absence of parental support growing up, discrimination, or whatever else.
Still, the underlying belief persisted that if we worked hard, we could achieve wealth, or at least the beginning of prosperity. And why? So we could consume.
In recent years, it looked like everyone was prosperous, given how many folks were driving large vehicles, carrying Starbucks cups, and buying homes. Regardless of race, everyone could get in on the great America prosperity ladder and climb as high as they wanted. It was diversity and prosperity at its finest — for enough money, we could all be equal. The only color that most people truly cared about was green.
Now, as we are discovering, all that equal-opportunity prosperity was an illusion based on people making bad decisions about credit, from the banks on down to Mr. and Mrs. Average Joe, and assuming that the oil was going to keep flowing to our country on the cheap.
So now many of us are scraping the bottoms of our change jars to fill up those nice, gas-guzzling SUVs that we must drive 100+ miles a day to and from our low-paying jobs, since we all fled the cities to get our slice of paradise in the country (or the suburbs, in many other states).
