sad,sad,sad

I've been in a number of "Wal-Marts" in various parts of this country. Often if I'm on the road somewhere, I know I can pull off and duck in to use their restrooms without drawing the attention of some clerk, as is likely in gas stations. Plus, you can stretch your legs and just walk around and check out the various shoppers and stuff. ( Besides maybe you need a Coke or something...)

Recently I was in the Wal-Mart in Rochester, Indiana. Again. I have kin nearby so that is a convenient landmark for me. I've seen the website "People of Wal-Mart" which features photos of people doing their shopping in these stores. Sometimes it seems funny to see the type of folks caught on camera. Many in outfits that should have never seen the light of day in public.

I don't think that the Rochester Wal-Mart is any worse than the rest in this regard, but the general make-up of the shopping public there is about the most depressing bunch I have ever found myself among in a Wal-Mart. It seems to be a magnet for every meth-head, overweight diabetic, sun blasted farm boy, whip-thin alcoholic, pudgy dirty single mom trailing a couple of crabbing kids, and white trash teenage boys who wish they were Eminem that dwell in that god-forsaken county.

I can see that the folks that have jobs there are doing their best to run a decent retail operation. To me, there seems to be a miasma of decrepitude that just hovers over the whole place and thwarts any effort to keep things in order or organized. The poor clerks are continually struggling against a subliminal tide of chaos that threatens to overcome them all the time. Spending more that five or ten minutes in that store just puts me in such a funk about the general state of humanity in the Midwest that I always end up muttering to myself all the way to my car in the parking lot. Desperate poverty and gross ignorance all jammed together in one location. Sad, sad, sad.

A Herculean task for us all

Recently I was visiting family in Taos, NM. Flew into Albuquerque and drove up to Taos. It's lovely country, and so different from the Midwest. I stopped often at 'pull-offs' to take pictures of the scenery, and my son took me on a number to 'jaunts' to scope out other beautiful views.

Sadly, I couldn't help but notice how much trash was strewn along the roadsides in that state. It's a truly distracting amount of refuse just discarded wherever people felt like, as if they couldn't take it home in their cars and dispose of it properly. (Food containers and wrappers, glass bottles both intact and broken to bits, soft drink and beer cans, plastic bottles of all varieties, plastic 'grocery' bags of multitudinous pedigree)

Don't know if the state of New Mexico can't afford to clean up their roadsides and public spaces, or if the citizens of New Mexico are just such uncaring slobs that it's impossible to keep up with the mess they make of their own 'back yard'. I do know that it does put the lie to their slogan-- "Land of Enchantment". Maybe they should add an amendment to it, such as, "But Watch Where You Put Your Feet".

As I commented to my son at one of our stops, "There's enough work here to keep a bodhisattva busy for the rest of their existence". Not that Indiana is exactly a shining example of caring for the environment either.....

Groveling at the throne of dollars

I'm really sick of newspaper columnists acting as apologists for the "Capitalistas". General Electric (largest corporation in the US) dodges paying any taxes on 14 BILLION in 'profits'. But Mona Charen thinks we should give them a break, because it's not them, it's the fault of the tax code.

Especially galling is her trotting out of the old debunked statement that they need those profits to 'make jobs'. Chances are the profit-taking comes from manipulation of stock prices... t'aint about needing that money to make jobs. I didn't hear anything about how many 'jobs' GE created in the last year in the US.....