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Possum Philosophy: Putting our complaining about prices into perspective

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By ROBERT CAHILL/Columnist Smyth County is lucky. It has Pat Arnold as its director of the Department of Social Services. He is a kind, concerned, compassionate and highly intelligent fellow who will fill this position admirably.... See more » By ROBERT CAHILL/Columnist Smyth County is lucky. It has Pat Arnold as its director of the Department of Social Services. He is a kind, concerned, compassionate and highly intelligent fellow who will fill this position admirably. Im lucky too. Pat has been a good friend since we were small children. He proved it once again this recent Election Day, both by cheering me up and giving me the material for this column. It was hot that day, and those of us working outside the polls were getting tired and sunburned. Nearly everyone who came through the polls that day was downhearted. It seemed that every person I had the opportunity to talk with that day, and there were quite a few (though not as many as usual), was concerned by the state of the national economy. People were worried about the soaring cost of oil and the disrupting effect it was having on our economy. I had to agree. Just a day or so earlier I had been shopping at Wal-Mart. My sister had asked me to pick up a few things for her, primarily an assortment of pasta that she and my brother use a lot in cooking and her supply was dwindling. Now this was not a problem for me. I have done the Wally-World Shuffle long enough to pretty well know what types and how many of each to get. I also have a pretty fair idea of prices. At least I did until I made my most recent buying trip. A majority of the pastas she likes hovered between 58 cents and 68 cents a box for a long time. Suddenly, it shot up almost overnight to between 98 cents and $1.19 for the same box. Now prices have been driven steadily upward by the oil problem, but this amounts to nearly a 75 percent increase in less than two weeks. So Election Day I was just as disgruntled as most folks. Add the daily price jump in gasoline and the mood in general was foul. Then along came Pat Arnold to cast his ballot. Good citizen that he is, he never fails to vote. Neither do I. (Sadly the same cant be said for some two-thirds of the voters in Saltville, which is a shame.) Now Pat and I commiserated on the sad state of the economy for a few moments when he looked at me, grinned a big goofy grin and said we were all crazy. We live in the greatest country on Earth, and here we are complaining about it. Here we are complaining about food getting so high, yet most of us have the money to buy it. Or at least to buy enough to do even if its not exactly what we want, Pat said. We might have to eat peanut butter or bologna sandwiches or a big pot of soup beans, but were not too likely to starve. There are people in Africa and other countries that are starving to death. They would be willing to kill if they were able to get their hands on enough of those beans to feed their families. Why you look back just 50 years ago. Look how far weve come since then. I lived over in Perryville on what they called Front Row. And when I was little, we didnt even have running water in the house, Arnold said. The company had a pipe that stuck up out of the ground every four or five houses. You took a bucket and went out to the pipe and carried water in and heated it on the stove if you needed hot water. Weve come a long way since then. Patrick and I started reeling off changes. I mentioned that I couldnt remember not having a TV, but I remembered the one we had when I was small (and it was the only one for the entire household) was a tiny black-and-white one. And it required a major wrestling match with the antenna every time you wanted to change the channel, which actually was not as often as it seemed as we were one of the lucky ones that could get three channels, and on rare occasions four. Many area residents received only one or two channels. Now we have at least four sets here, all in living color with stereo sound. Like most folks, there is a TV for every family member and often a spare to boot. Big ones, small ones and in-between ones, all of which get numerous channels. And that doesnt account for the VCRs, DVRs, DVD players, and various gaming systems hooked in to most televisions today. Pat agreed. You didnt buy See less »

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Possum Philosophy: Putting our complaining about prices into perspective

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