On the ground

So, have you been whining lately?

I know I have. I live in a rural community full of working class families desperately trying to make ends meet. Nothing here is close to anything else (as is the case with most rural communities), so folks are getting killed at the gas pump.

Lots of farmers, so some folks are getting doubly killed at the gas pump.

It’s a Northeastern rural community, which means its going to be pretty cold here in a few months and we still heat most of our homes with heating oil. Which means a lot of families are going to be getting triply killed by those insanely high fuel prices.

And then there’s the price of food. We have a bunch of regional and national chain supermarkets here, which means a lot of what is sold is not locally sourced. And that means our food prices are not any lower than anybody else’s. (I’ve always thought that people who live around farms ought to eat better than anybody else in the country but, alas, that is not the case.)

The local manufacturing plants are cutting jobs. There is nothing here that remotely resembles a real push to develop the local economy and certainly no organized effort to encourage and support local small businesses.

Whine, whine.

(Pause for musical interlude … )

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

It must be nice to be Phil Gramm, with the sort of income that let’s you call the rest of us hallucinating whiners. It must be real nice.

[tags]politics, 2008 presidential campaign, economy, Phil Gramm, John McCain, Barack Obama[/tags]