Thanks for this essay. Your humanity, empathy, and the observations of the particular are what life is about. The bag of dried beans as the oldest economic indicator. Your nephew on his knees in the straw.
My own checkout story happened when an item on the belt didn’t scan properly. Then the cashier had to call overhead for a price-check. This encouraged everyone in the line to chime-in and guess what the price might turn out to be (higher than anyone thought, given the economy). It brought us together as shoppers, eaters, humans, home economists. (It was a chunk of cheese I could have done without.)
I'm 71 collect social security and I still work on hard demanding physical labor job, because everything is SO high. I can't afford to live just on social security
Hi Tom, thank you as always for your wonderful writing. You look and see deeply, and you state what you see honestly, and I always love that.
Your story is literally my life. I work in a grocery story, a small chain here in Central Texas. We're the only grocery story in a small rural town and as such we're sort of the nerve center. I started working there 3 years ago and I guess you could say I found my sweet spot. The work isn't hard and I love the people I have come to know over the last few years, through beauty and tragedy and two eclipses and so many small milestones....
I'm an older woman and married to a woman and clearly a "liberal" and you wouldn't think I would advertise those facts, in our small town Texas grocery store, but everyone in town not only knows about my wife but they know she's had health issues and they all tell me how they pray for her and I feel very much a part of the community. And while we don't talk politics (my manager is constantly reminding me, not in a bad way just a business like way and it makes me laugh because they all know already, but for some reason they love me anyway), and all I have to do to protest against Trump and his regime and his policies is to be who I am, because the love I feel for every single person is real and it's authentic and it makes everything he tries to say about us a lie.
Trump will never win because the American people are so much better than him. All of us, every single American, share values and beliefs that he simply does not understand. And to me, the people under him, who really did appear at one time to have things like morals and integrity, have just blown it all up and for what? WHAT is this regime going to accomplish that will ever be remembered or recorded as truly advantageous to this country in any way? It seems like all he has done is damage, and so much in such a short time.
To get to the point, if I have one, the checkout line is one of the last best honest places in human life. I have had more honest exchanges of information or support between myself and my customers than I can count. They know me, and I know them, whether they actually even know my name or not. And when we're getting down to the counting, the increase in prices is really starting to pinch. Most of my customers are older, say 60+. This area has a large population of retired people living in their RV's and "having their best life". I get it, it looks real attractive at this point with costs increasing and the income, well, not. I have been having talks with our meat manager and our produce manager, sharing things we've all heard and they are keeping and opening new channels open with local producers. I'm lucky, we live in a place where a lot of food is already produced, and wild game is plentiful and people know how to deal with food on a more household level, not just what you get at the grocery store. I hope that the grocery store will be able to continue to be the nerve center, when and if deliveries at the macro level fail, we will be able to keep the shelves stocked with other merchandise. I don't know, I only know that the only way any of us are going to get through whatever crazy shit is coming is to get local, get hyper focused on our local communities, working together to combine resources and make sure everyone is ok. I have said before many times that I think that in and of itself is going to cool the fever that has been raging in this country for a decade - our need to rely on each other and trust each other (because only face to face interaction is proof against digital manipulation) is going to remind us all that we are first and foremost Americans, and we truly do love each other.
What you’re describing doesn’t need decoration. It’s already heavy with life.
A grocery store in a small town is never just a grocery store. It’s where the town quietly checks its own pulse. People come in carrying whatever the day gave them, and they set it down between the produce aisle and the register. You see them when they are fine, when they are tired, when they are trying to hold something together that is starting to slip. And they see you too, whether they say it out loud or not.
There is something real about that kind of work. Not in a heroic sense. In a steady sense. Repeated contact. Familiar faces. The slow building of recognition that doesn’t require agreement to exist. You don’t have to share a worldview to know someone’s name, or to notice when their shoulders look different than they did last month.
I understand what you mean when you call the checkout line one of the last honest places. It is not that people are pure there. It is that the situation strips away most of the performance. There is a total price. There is a wait. There is a next person. And in that narrow frame, people tend to be more themselves than they are in places where nothing has to be finished.
But I want to be careful with the idea that this kind of honesty at the local level proves something clean or final about the country as a whole. It is tempting, especially when your daily life feels coherent, to believe that coherence is the national condition. It is not. What you are seeing is real, but it is local by necessity. It works because it is small enough to touch.
The larger system is not one thing moving in one direction. It is many things layered on top of each other. People trying to get through the week. Institutions trying to hold together under strain. Information moving too fast and meaning moving too slow. None of that resolves neatly into a single story about who Americans are.
What is true, though, is what you already know in your hands from working that line. People are dependent on each other in ways they do not always name. A store becomes a kind of bridge between those dependencies. When prices rise, when supply tightens, when something feels uncertain, that bridge starts to carry more weight than it was built for. And still it holds, mostly because of routine and recognition and the small agreements people make without ever calling them agreements.
The idea of going more local, of tightening the circle of trust until it is face to face again, is not wrong. It is already how most people survive, even if they don’t talk about it that way. But it does not cancel out the larger world. It just gives people somewhere solid to stand while the larger world keeps shifting.
If there is anything steady in what you wrote, it is not a political conclusion. It is the observation that people are still capable of seeing each other clearly at short distance. That is not sentimental. It is practical. It is the only reason places like yours do not break under pressure.
The checkout line does not fix anything. It does something smaller and more stubborn. It keeps people visible to each other long enough to get through the day.
“There is something real about that kind of work. Not in a heroic sense. In a steady sense. Repeated contact. Familiar faces. The slow building of recognition that doesn’t require agreement to exist. You don’t have to share a worldview to know someone’s name, or to notice when their shoulders look different than they did last month.”
I think you just described nourishment in a dozen different guises.
Thanks Tom, and I agree. Our community is special, for sure, and I wish I could put my finger on what makes it different here. My older 2 children live in another small town in central Texas, farther north, and I don’t think they would have the same outlook. And I’m not 100% sanguine - I think it’s probably a 50/50 chance my wife and I will ultimately have to leave. But I’m a lot more hopeful than I was a couple of months ago. Fewer and fewer MAGA hats and shirts. More and more uncertainty about the direction things are headed. And for now I’ll take what I can get
Laurie, it is so great that your local store is providing a service to both customers and local farmers! We have many local producers in southern Wisconsin who sell to smaller stores, co-ops and at farmers markets as well. I buy as much of my food as possible from them and avoid the big supermarkets. The quality is much better, the price is usually less than in a supermarket, and I can get almost everything I need: locally grown dried beans and grains, cheese, eggs, milk, honey and maple syrup, jams and condiments, bread, bakery, butter, all sorts of vegetables and fruits in season, meats of all types for those who eat meat.
I've been in both lines at the market. Today I have what I need in the fridg, and a few things I don't need, but there was a time when things had to back on the shelf at the line.
I feel bad for your nephew. I feel bad for this country. Trump is killing the spirit of the American people on both sides. On his side he's killing the spirit of caring and grace. On the other side he's killing the spirit of hope.
Thank you, Tom. 40 years ago, early 1980s, I was married to a man finishing his PhD. We lived on about $12000 a year from his job as an historian. And we could. I got part time teaching jobs. Three bags of groceries was $30. Complete. Our rent was under $200 for a 2- bedroom apartment. Nice one in a stable working class community. Our landlord was a Teamster. Salt of the earth. We all did OK. We were none of us rich, but we were stable. Income was pretty proportionate to outgo.
But in the downturn of the new "supply side" economy, we would sit in working class restaurants and listen to men trying to sell their tools for cash. If you don't know what that means, that a man selling his tools was cutting off his legs as an independent worker, well now you do. We both cried on the way home - for him, for everyone afflicted by the soaring interest, collapsing incomes.
It was the start of the war on not poverty but the poor. It was a war on labor. It was a war on gov't assistance. "A rising tide lifts all boats" they said! Only years later did it occur to me that tides lift from BELOW, not from above. There was no 'trickle down". It was all a lie, and we kept falling for it.
America keeps pushing the idea you are totally responsible for your own fate. No government intervention is needed. Kind of changed our tune during the Depression, but then went back to the idea we were all independent and on our own.
But we forget how America was built. Free land. Communities that did barn raisings and harvests together. Homestead Act of 1862. Wagon trains not individuals. Common cooperation, shared burdens, the hot dish carried over in times of joy and sorrow, sickness, and hardship. We built strong unions in the 20th Century that made the middle class in urban areas. We worked together.
And then came the men at the table to decide we didn't deserve any of it. And we bought it. We especially bought it when Black and Brown people were included. And we voted in the snake oil salesman, the Man Behind the Curtain. And here we are.
BIG question is - can the community strength of the past, waxed and waned as it has, come back so we can survive this downturn, this hardship? It's what got us through the Great Depression and WW II. Can we find that again? My Omaha grandmother was well known to "hoboes". She had the "cat" sign carved on the front fence meaning "a kindhearted woman lives here." She fed people out the back door in exchange for a little work. I do the same. Have housed homeless folks in the backyard, some in the garage, some under the gazebo in tents. 16 people in 11 years. Others use our address for mail and have their own box. My postal carrier gets it and goes with it. That way they keep meager benefits current, apply for jobs, housing, and keep in touch with lost family. You need a sandwich? Have a seat on the porch and rest a bit while I put together eats for you. Do me a favor later.
I can't be any other way. It's what I know about living. As the song for Ken Burns' WW II documentary says, "Sharing the blessing I've received." We are not yet done with scarcity and want, shortages and loss, poverty and hunger. If we do not help one another, why bother with ANYTHING? We have stockpiled food so we can share with others and maintain ourselves. I now have pounds and pounds of dried beans, peas, lentils and a garden growing for potatoes, carrots, onions. All for whoever needs it.
There is no rising tide. It's now just us. Keep paddling.
$12,000 a year. Early 1980s. Two bedrooms. Under $200 rent. A grocery cart that comes out to $30 and is complete. Meat. Milk. Bread. Enough.
People talk about that like it was another country. It was not another country. It was the same roads. Same towns. Same names on the mailbox.
Something changed in the math.
Men sitting in working class restaurants trying to sell their tools. Not metaphor. Actual tools. A box laid open on a table. Wrenches. Saws. A drill still warm from use the day before. Cash on the table. Silence around it.
That is not adjustment. That is subtraction.
The language that came later was clean. Supply side. Efficiency. Market discipline. It sounded like weather. It was not weather.
It was policy written in rooms that never saw those tables.
You saw what people forget to see when they argue about it later. The human lag behind the economic decision. The time it takes for a theory to become a bruise.
A man does not sell his tools because he is optimistic.
He sells them because something already ended.
America tells a simple story about itself. Individual responsibility. Self making. Independence as virtue.
But the country was never built that way.
Homestead Act of 1862. Free land. Shared risk disguised as private chance. Wagon trains. Barn raisings. Unions. Church basements. Neighborhood systems that functioned like a second government, unpaid and unmarked.
Then the story changed.
Not all at once. Not in a single vote. More like erosion along a shoreline that people still insist is stable because the horizon looks the same.
You are naming the part that does not fit the story people are told.
The war was not announced as a war.
It rarely is.
It arrives as interest rates. As layoffs. As rent increases that come in increments small enough to feel like personal failure instead of structure.
And people adjust themselves to the pressure instead of naming the pressure.
You are also naming what survived it.
A porch. A sandwich. A postal carrier who understands without being told. A backyard where someone can sleep under a roof that is not theirs but is not hostile either.
16 people in 11 years.
That is not a sentiment.
That is a ledger.
The state does not see that ledger. It only sees outcomes. Housing status. Benefit eligibility. Address stability. It does not see the space between those categories where people are kept alive by permission that was never formalized.
The system calls it informal support.
It means someone did not fall all the way down.
The question you ask at the end is the only one that matters and the only one that cannot be answered cleanly.
Can it come back.
The country has done versions of it before. Depression. War. Crisis that forced coordination instead of argument. It built institutions out of necessity, not agreement.
Then those institutions were slowly reinterpreted as optional.
Optional is a dangerous word.
It sounds like freedom.
It often means withdrawal.
There is a moment in every system like this where the official structure and the lived structure separate. On paper everything still functions. In practice, people begin to carry what the paper no longer holds.
That is where you are.
That is where the porch is.
That is where the beans are.
Pounds and pounds of them. Lentils. Peas. A garden planned in advance of need. Potatoes. Carrots. Onions. Not ideology. Preparation.
The rising tide line was always a story people told when they did not want to describe the pump.
You are not describing the tide.
You are describing the bucket.
You are describing who still holds it.
Keep paddling is not a slogan.
It is what people say when there is no larger system visible at the edge of the water.
I live in a liberal city in a liberal state now. We have beloved friends who would never disagree with any of what you said, I said - except, they don't believe what I've done, what I've experienced. Deep down inside some of them, there lingers a belief that "they" are just not doing it right. It is THAT ingrained.
Used to advocate with a group trying to end usurious interest from Payday lenders. When we couldn't get that done, the group tried to put a limit on the numbers of times people could borrow from the sharks. And at that point I said, "Well, find me some alternative for them then". Nobody really could at the time. And one woman, in exasperation at my unwillingness to regulate the poor snapped, "Well, they just have to learn to manage their money better!" AS IF THEY WERE THE PROBLEM.
Those who don't get why selling tools and needing payday loans are essential are about to find out how bad it is. End SNAP? End Medicaid? We ain't seen nothin' yet. Welcome to the new Gilded Age but this time fraught with policy makers who haven't a lick of charity in them. At least there used to be charity hospitals, soup kitchens paid for by the rich to assuage their guilt. Now? Guilt does not exist among the new Robber Barons. Social Darwinism has again lifted its ugly head, and they think the poor deserve their fate. Bad genes. Makes oppression all OK. Your nephew? Sucker. Should have sold out and worked the ranch as an employee.
Not sure what is coming, but without community, we will surely sink. I think Scottsbluff and rural areas may fare a lot better than urban ones. But I will keep our tiny homestead going for those in our city as best I can. What else can one do?
What the hell? What you pay is not normal. I read article by economist Krugman who was discussing the rumour that Europe is falling behind in wealth for citizens. But what you pay is crazy. For 200€ i have groceries for a weak for 4. And the cost of health care and education and housing i think is far lower too. The only thing we pay more for is gaz and gazoline and electricity. Our salaries are indeed lower as we pay directly taxes on it that are high. But I am sore our average living standard is much higher. GDP has nothing to do with quality of life
Dorothea Lange photographed "Migrant Mother," a 32-year-old who looked sixty from hunger and hardship, for Roy Stryker's FSA documentary project.
Gordon Parks documented poverty in Washington and Chicago for that same FSA program under Stryker.
Those photographs documented the need and built public support for New Deal programs like the WPA. Photography became witness; witness demanded action.
Christ said "the poor you will have with you always," but he didn't say ignore them while you build pleasure palaces for billionaires.
Trump stands in UFC arenas promising relief to people whose grocery bills climbed from $180 to $247 in two years, while charging a million dollars per seat at his inauguration dinner.
He opens American markets to Argentine beef—crashing cattle prices for Nebraska ranchers still calving in the straw—because meatpackers paid for the table.
Gas hits $4.76 after he promised $2.
The woman with store-brand cereal and dried beans in her Safeway cart knows the checkout total before she leaves home now. She's learned math she should never have needed to learn.
Earlier presidents saw suffering documented in photographs and built programs in response. This one sees suffering and sells tickets to watch from skyboxes.
This is Orwell's 1984. Remember Winston Smith's wretched food and Victory Cigarettes? The ruling class has a simple motto: everything for us, nothing for you. We must take this back while there is still opportunity. Real resistance is hard and will require sacrifice, but the irony is that the sacrifice will happen one way or another.
The Ogallala Aquifer, on which sits the legendary bread basket of the US, is being depleted far faster than it can recharge, with depletion timelines varying dramatically by region. Since 1950, agricultural irrigation has reduced the aquifer's saturated volume by an estimated 9%, and if fully drained, it would take over 6,000 years to refill naturally. AI data centers puts this consumption on fast track while the technology eliminates the few remaining jobs.
The Lange photograph is the right reference and the distance between what it did and what we have now is the whole argument.
Stryker's photographs worked because they reached people who still believed they were responsible for what happened to other people. That belief is what is being dismantled now. Not the photographs. The belief that the photographs should produce action.
They have seen the receipts. They know about the aquifer. The Ogallala depletion is not a secret. The 6,000 year recharge timeline is not a secret. The data centers going in on top of it are not a secret.
They know.
The difference between then and now is not information. It is accountability.
The aquifer is the one that keeps me at the kitchen table after the Jameson is gone. Everything else has a timeline measured in years. The aquifer has a timeline measured in the lives of children currently in elementary school in this town.
And the data centers are going in.
Because the men who build them will not be here when the water is gone.
Thank you for saying the facts plainly. That is not nothing.
So little is being said about Argentinian beef and the harm being done to our farmers. Thank you for your daily articles, I absolutely relate to pain of surviving in this crazy economy.
Eloquent and beautifully-written, as always; and fully conveys the tragedy and travesty being wrought upon us by the Big Men who neither know nor care. 😢💔
My husband and I noticed the same thing and it’s just the two of us and it is gone up to where we noticed it. I’m so thankful that we are not destitute. We can afford it but we see that there’s some people that can’t and my heart breaks for them! I give money to Food banks I give money to the Los Angeles mission. I try to help where I can and like I said my heart breaks through them and even if we get a new administration in there prices rarely go down. If they do, it’s so minimal it doesn’t make a difference really. It goes up $.25 but it only comes down $.10 so it still is up by $.15 and people don’t see that. They go “see it’s come down”but not to what it was. I think with a lot of people, math was not the strong point. But we’ve got to keep on putting 1 foot in front of the other going forward, and hopefully we can take a deep breath, soon!
No, thank you Tom. I live in New Zealand. A very different place but now suffering under similar crushing agendas. Your writing has an extraordinary quality. So evocative and sad but full of joyous humanity. It makes me think of the welsh ‘hiraeth’ and the Maori ‘wairua’. There is in your writing and its content an elusive sense of warmth and nourishment. Go well out there all of you. We share your pain in these brutal times for so many.
My first reaction was to be judgy. We eat very little meat and zero beef. We buy oatmeal by the twenty pound bag (I’m too lazy to flake the oats.). I make all our breads, cakes, cookies, etc. It’s much cheaper and healthier.
Our neighbor, a rancher claims his beeves are at an all time high, price wise, but he has fiber trees to fall back on.
Our local grocery store put out signs claiming prices are much lower than they used to be. BS! Coffee went from $6.99 to $9.99 in March 2025. That same bag is now $11.99. Good thing I stocked up before trump took office. We could eat mostly from our property, but I really don’t like kale or milking a goat.
Our lives have changed such that we plan way ahead. No more eating out, no new clothes, no travel. Hmmm..
I read the post in which your nephew explained why he'd voted for tRump -- that was the first I'd seen, and why I subscribed -- and now, after reading this, I have to ask:
I gathered that from your piece — but there’s a difference between regretting how tRump treated his vote and regretting the vote that allowed tRump to do the mistreating … so to speak.
I’m not seeking a mea culpa from your nephew: his life, views on politics, and votes are none of my business, but I just can’t wrap my head around the idea of being lied to in every way — of having the trust and hope he put into his vote for tRump be so egregiously violated — then not regretting the vote that enabled every bad thing that flowed from it.
All I can think of is that he must have felt he had no other choice — and that much I can understand. I think most of us have been in situations where we saw no good options, then made the decision for whatever seemed to be the least bad choice.
Thanks for this essay. Your humanity, empathy, and the observations of the particular are what life is about. The bag of dried beans as the oldest economic indicator. Your nephew on his knees in the straw.
My own checkout story happened when an item on the belt didn’t scan properly. Then the cashier had to call overhead for a price-check. This encouraged everyone in the line to chime-in and guess what the price might turn out to be (higher than anyone thought, given the economy). It brought us together as shoppers, eaters, humans, home economists. (It was a chunk of cheese I could have done without.)
I understand
I've been widowed for 33 years
I'm 71 collect social security and I still work on hard demanding physical labor job, because everything is SO high. I can't afford to live just on social security
Hi Tom, thank you as always for your wonderful writing. You look and see deeply, and you state what you see honestly, and I always love that.
Your story is literally my life. I work in a grocery story, a small chain here in Central Texas. We're the only grocery story in a small rural town and as such we're sort of the nerve center. I started working there 3 years ago and I guess you could say I found my sweet spot. The work isn't hard and I love the people I have come to know over the last few years, through beauty and tragedy and two eclipses and so many small milestones....
I'm an older woman and married to a woman and clearly a "liberal" and you wouldn't think I would advertise those facts, in our small town Texas grocery store, but everyone in town not only knows about my wife but they know she's had health issues and they all tell me how they pray for her and I feel very much a part of the community. And while we don't talk politics (my manager is constantly reminding me, not in a bad way just a business like way and it makes me laugh because they all know already, but for some reason they love me anyway), and all I have to do to protest against Trump and his regime and his policies is to be who I am, because the love I feel for every single person is real and it's authentic and it makes everything he tries to say about us a lie.
Trump will never win because the American people are so much better than him. All of us, every single American, share values and beliefs that he simply does not understand. And to me, the people under him, who really did appear at one time to have things like morals and integrity, have just blown it all up and for what? WHAT is this regime going to accomplish that will ever be remembered or recorded as truly advantageous to this country in any way? It seems like all he has done is damage, and so much in such a short time.
To get to the point, if I have one, the checkout line is one of the last best honest places in human life. I have had more honest exchanges of information or support between myself and my customers than I can count. They know me, and I know them, whether they actually even know my name or not. And when we're getting down to the counting, the increase in prices is really starting to pinch. Most of my customers are older, say 60+. This area has a large population of retired people living in their RV's and "having their best life". I get it, it looks real attractive at this point with costs increasing and the income, well, not. I have been having talks with our meat manager and our produce manager, sharing things we've all heard and they are keeping and opening new channels open with local producers. I'm lucky, we live in a place where a lot of food is already produced, and wild game is plentiful and people know how to deal with food on a more household level, not just what you get at the grocery store. I hope that the grocery store will be able to continue to be the nerve center, when and if deliveries at the macro level fail, we will be able to keep the shelves stocked with other merchandise. I don't know, I only know that the only way any of us are going to get through whatever crazy shit is coming is to get local, get hyper focused on our local communities, working together to combine resources and make sure everyone is ok. I have said before many times that I think that in and of itself is going to cool the fever that has been raging in this country for a decade - our need to rely on each other and trust each other (because only face to face interaction is proof against digital manipulation) is going to remind us all that we are first and foremost Americans, and we truly do love each other.
What you’re describing doesn’t need decoration. It’s already heavy with life.
A grocery store in a small town is never just a grocery store. It’s where the town quietly checks its own pulse. People come in carrying whatever the day gave them, and they set it down between the produce aisle and the register. You see them when they are fine, when they are tired, when they are trying to hold something together that is starting to slip. And they see you too, whether they say it out loud or not.
There is something real about that kind of work. Not in a heroic sense. In a steady sense. Repeated contact. Familiar faces. The slow building of recognition that doesn’t require agreement to exist. You don’t have to share a worldview to know someone’s name, or to notice when their shoulders look different than they did last month.
I understand what you mean when you call the checkout line one of the last honest places. It is not that people are pure there. It is that the situation strips away most of the performance. There is a total price. There is a wait. There is a next person. And in that narrow frame, people tend to be more themselves than they are in places where nothing has to be finished.
But I want to be careful with the idea that this kind of honesty at the local level proves something clean or final about the country as a whole. It is tempting, especially when your daily life feels coherent, to believe that coherence is the national condition. It is not. What you are seeing is real, but it is local by necessity. It works because it is small enough to touch.
The larger system is not one thing moving in one direction. It is many things layered on top of each other. People trying to get through the week. Institutions trying to hold together under strain. Information moving too fast and meaning moving too slow. None of that resolves neatly into a single story about who Americans are.
What is true, though, is what you already know in your hands from working that line. People are dependent on each other in ways they do not always name. A store becomes a kind of bridge between those dependencies. When prices rise, when supply tightens, when something feels uncertain, that bridge starts to carry more weight than it was built for. And still it holds, mostly because of routine and recognition and the small agreements people make without ever calling them agreements.
The idea of going more local, of tightening the circle of trust until it is face to face again, is not wrong. It is already how most people survive, even if they don’t talk about it that way. But it does not cancel out the larger world. It just gives people somewhere solid to stand while the larger world keeps shifting.
If there is anything steady in what you wrote, it is not a political conclusion. It is the observation that people are still capable of seeing each other clearly at short distance. That is not sentimental. It is practical. It is the only reason places like yours do not break under pressure.
The checkout line does not fix anything. It does something smaller and more stubborn. It keeps people visible to each other long enough to get through the day.
“There is something real about that kind of work. Not in a heroic sense. In a steady sense. Repeated contact. Familiar faces. The slow building of recognition that doesn’t require agreement to exist. You don’t have to share a worldview to know someone’s name, or to notice when their shoulders look different than they did last month.”
I think you just described nourishment in a dozen different guises.
Thanks Tom, and I agree. Our community is special, for sure, and I wish I could put my finger on what makes it different here. My older 2 children live in another small town in central Texas, farther north, and I don’t think they would have the same outlook. And I’m not 100% sanguine - I think it’s probably a 50/50 chance my wife and I will ultimately have to leave. But I’m a lot more hopeful than I was a couple of months ago. Fewer and fewer MAGA hats and shirts. More and more uncertainty about the direction things are headed. And for now I’ll take what I can get
Laurie, it is so great that your local store is providing a service to both customers and local farmers! We have many local producers in southern Wisconsin who sell to smaller stores, co-ops and at farmers markets as well. I buy as much of my food as possible from them and avoid the big supermarkets. The quality is much better, the price is usually less than in a supermarket, and I can get almost everything I need: locally grown dried beans and grains, cheese, eggs, milk, honey and maple syrup, jams and condiments, bread, bakery, butter, all sorts of vegetables and fruits in season, meats of all types for those who eat meat.
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I've been in both lines at the market. Today I have what I need in the fridg, and a few things I don't need, but there was a time when things had to back on the shelf at the line.
I feel bad for your nephew. I feel bad for this country. Trump is killing the spirit of the American people on both sides. On his side he's killing the spirit of caring and grace. On the other side he's killing the spirit of hope.
The media wants to portray the working class as in the bag for Trump. The longer he stays in power the more you will see that’s not true.
Thank you, Tom. 40 years ago, early 1980s, I was married to a man finishing his PhD. We lived on about $12000 a year from his job as an historian. And we could. I got part time teaching jobs. Three bags of groceries was $30. Complete. Our rent was under $200 for a 2- bedroom apartment. Nice one in a stable working class community. Our landlord was a Teamster. Salt of the earth. We all did OK. We were none of us rich, but we were stable. Income was pretty proportionate to outgo.
But in the downturn of the new "supply side" economy, we would sit in working class restaurants and listen to men trying to sell their tools for cash. If you don't know what that means, that a man selling his tools was cutting off his legs as an independent worker, well now you do. We both cried on the way home - for him, for everyone afflicted by the soaring interest, collapsing incomes.
It was the start of the war on not poverty but the poor. It was a war on labor. It was a war on gov't assistance. "A rising tide lifts all boats" they said! Only years later did it occur to me that tides lift from BELOW, not from above. There was no 'trickle down". It was all a lie, and we kept falling for it.
America keeps pushing the idea you are totally responsible for your own fate. No government intervention is needed. Kind of changed our tune during the Depression, but then went back to the idea we were all independent and on our own.
But we forget how America was built. Free land. Communities that did barn raisings and harvests together. Homestead Act of 1862. Wagon trains not individuals. Common cooperation, shared burdens, the hot dish carried over in times of joy and sorrow, sickness, and hardship. We built strong unions in the 20th Century that made the middle class in urban areas. We worked together.
And then came the men at the table to decide we didn't deserve any of it. And we bought it. We especially bought it when Black and Brown people were included. And we voted in the snake oil salesman, the Man Behind the Curtain. And here we are.
BIG question is - can the community strength of the past, waxed and waned as it has, come back so we can survive this downturn, this hardship? It's what got us through the Great Depression and WW II. Can we find that again? My Omaha grandmother was well known to "hoboes". She had the "cat" sign carved on the front fence meaning "a kindhearted woman lives here." She fed people out the back door in exchange for a little work. I do the same. Have housed homeless folks in the backyard, some in the garage, some under the gazebo in tents. 16 people in 11 years. Others use our address for mail and have their own box. My postal carrier gets it and goes with it. That way they keep meager benefits current, apply for jobs, housing, and keep in touch with lost family. You need a sandwich? Have a seat on the porch and rest a bit while I put together eats for you. Do me a favor later.
I can't be any other way. It's what I know about living. As the song for Ken Burns' WW II documentary says, "Sharing the blessing I've received." We are not yet done with scarcity and want, shortages and loss, poverty and hunger. If we do not help one another, why bother with ANYTHING? We have stockpiled food so we can share with others and maintain ourselves. I now have pounds and pounds of dried beans, peas, lentils and a garden growing for potatoes, carrots, onions. All for whoever needs it.
There is no rising tide. It's now just us. Keep paddling.
What you are describing is not theory.
It is arithmetic.
$12,000 a year. Early 1980s. Two bedrooms. Under $200 rent. A grocery cart that comes out to $30 and is complete. Meat. Milk. Bread. Enough.
People talk about that like it was another country. It was not another country. It was the same roads. Same towns. Same names on the mailbox.
Something changed in the math.
Men sitting in working class restaurants trying to sell their tools. Not metaphor. Actual tools. A box laid open on a table. Wrenches. Saws. A drill still warm from use the day before. Cash on the table. Silence around it.
That is not adjustment. That is subtraction.
The language that came later was clean. Supply side. Efficiency. Market discipline. It sounded like weather. It was not weather.
It was policy written in rooms that never saw those tables.
You saw what people forget to see when they argue about it later. The human lag behind the economic decision. The time it takes for a theory to become a bruise.
A man does not sell his tools because he is optimistic.
He sells them because something already ended.
America tells a simple story about itself. Individual responsibility. Self making. Independence as virtue.
But the country was never built that way.
Homestead Act of 1862. Free land. Shared risk disguised as private chance. Wagon trains. Barn raisings. Unions. Church basements. Neighborhood systems that functioned like a second government, unpaid and unmarked.
Then the story changed.
Not all at once. Not in a single vote. More like erosion along a shoreline that people still insist is stable because the horizon looks the same.
You are naming the part that does not fit the story people are told.
The war was not announced as a war.
It rarely is.
It arrives as interest rates. As layoffs. As rent increases that come in increments small enough to feel like personal failure instead of structure.
And people adjust themselves to the pressure instead of naming the pressure.
You are also naming what survived it.
A porch. A sandwich. A postal carrier who understands without being told. A backyard where someone can sleep under a roof that is not theirs but is not hostile either.
16 people in 11 years.
That is not a sentiment.
That is a ledger.
The state does not see that ledger. It only sees outcomes. Housing status. Benefit eligibility. Address stability. It does not see the space between those categories where people are kept alive by permission that was never formalized.
The system calls it informal support.
It means someone did not fall all the way down.
The question you ask at the end is the only one that matters and the only one that cannot be answered cleanly.
Can it come back.
The country has done versions of it before. Depression. War. Crisis that forced coordination instead of argument. It built institutions out of necessity, not agreement.
Then those institutions were slowly reinterpreted as optional.
Optional is a dangerous word.
It sounds like freedom.
It often means withdrawal.
There is a moment in every system like this where the official structure and the lived structure separate. On paper everything still functions. In practice, people begin to carry what the paper no longer holds.
That is where you are.
That is where the porch is.
That is where the beans are.
Pounds and pounds of them. Lentils. Peas. A garden planned in advance of need. Potatoes. Carrots. Onions. Not ideology. Preparation.
The rising tide line was always a story people told when they did not want to describe the pump.
You are not describing the tide.
You are describing the bucket.
You are describing who still holds it.
Keep paddling is not a slogan.
It is what people say when there is no larger system visible at the edge of the water.
I live in a liberal city in a liberal state now. We have beloved friends who would never disagree with any of what you said, I said - except, they don't believe what I've done, what I've experienced. Deep down inside some of them, there lingers a belief that "they" are just not doing it right. It is THAT ingrained.
Used to advocate with a group trying to end usurious interest from Payday lenders. When we couldn't get that done, the group tried to put a limit on the numbers of times people could borrow from the sharks. And at that point I said, "Well, find me some alternative for them then". Nobody really could at the time. And one woman, in exasperation at my unwillingness to regulate the poor snapped, "Well, they just have to learn to manage their money better!" AS IF THEY WERE THE PROBLEM.
Those who don't get why selling tools and needing payday loans are essential are about to find out how bad it is. End SNAP? End Medicaid? We ain't seen nothin' yet. Welcome to the new Gilded Age but this time fraught with policy makers who haven't a lick of charity in them. At least there used to be charity hospitals, soup kitchens paid for by the rich to assuage their guilt. Now? Guilt does not exist among the new Robber Barons. Social Darwinism has again lifted its ugly head, and they think the poor deserve their fate. Bad genes. Makes oppression all OK. Your nephew? Sucker. Should have sold out and worked the ranch as an employee.
Not sure what is coming, but without community, we will surely sink. I think Scottsbluff and rural areas may fare a lot better than urban ones. But I will keep our tiny homestead going for those in our city as best I can. What else can one do?
What the hell? What you pay is not normal. I read article by economist Krugman who was discussing the rumour that Europe is falling behind in wealth for citizens. But what you pay is crazy. For 200€ i have groceries for a weak for 4. And the cost of health care and education and housing i think is far lower too. The only thing we pay more for is gaz and gazoline and electricity. Our salaries are indeed lower as we pay directly taxes on it that are high. But I am sore our average living standard is much higher. GDP has nothing to do with quality of life
Dorothea Lange photographed "Migrant Mother," a 32-year-old who looked sixty from hunger and hardship, for Roy Stryker's FSA documentary project.
Gordon Parks documented poverty in Washington and Chicago for that same FSA program under Stryker.
Those photographs documented the need and built public support for New Deal programs like the WPA. Photography became witness; witness demanded action.
Christ said "the poor you will have with you always," but he didn't say ignore them while you build pleasure palaces for billionaires.
Trump stands in UFC arenas promising relief to people whose grocery bills climbed from $180 to $247 in two years, while charging a million dollars per seat at his inauguration dinner.
He opens American markets to Argentine beef—crashing cattle prices for Nebraska ranchers still calving in the straw—because meatpackers paid for the table.
Gas hits $4.76 after he promised $2.
The woman with store-brand cereal and dried beans in her Safeway cart knows the checkout total before she leaves home now. She's learned math she should never have needed to learn.
Earlier presidents saw suffering documented in photographs and built programs in response. This one sees suffering and sells tickets to watch from skyboxes.
This is Orwell's 1984. Remember Winston Smith's wretched food and Victory Cigarettes? The ruling class has a simple motto: everything for us, nothing for you. We must take this back while there is still opportunity. Real resistance is hard and will require sacrifice, but the irony is that the sacrifice will happen one way or another.
The Ogallala Aquifer, on which sits the legendary bread basket of the US, is being depleted far faster than it can recharge, with depletion timelines varying dramatically by region. Since 1950, agricultural irrigation has reduced the aquifer's saturated volume by an estimated 9%, and if fully drained, it would take over 6,000 years to refill naturally. AI data centers puts this consumption on fast track while the technology eliminates the few remaining jobs.
These are the facts.
The Lange photograph is the right reference and the distance between what it did and what we have now is the whole argument.
Stryker's photographs worked because they reached people who still believed they were responsible for what happened to other people. That belief is what is being dismantled now. Not the photographs. The belief that the photographs should produce action.
They have seen the receipts. They know about the aquifer. The Ogallala depletion is not a secret. The 6,000 year recharge timeline is not a secret. The data centers going in on top of it are not a secret.
They know.
The difference between then and now is not information. It is accountability.
The aquifer is the one that keeps me at the kitchen table after the Jameson is gone. Everything else has a timeline measured in years. The aquifer has a timeline measured in the lives of children currently in elementary school in this town.
And the data centers are going in.
Because the men who build them will not be here when the water is gone.
Thank you for saying the facts plainly. That is not nothing.
So little is being said about Argentinian beef and the harm being done to our farmers. Thank you for your daily articles, I absolutely relate to pain of surviving in this crazy economy.
Eloquent and beautifully-written, as always; and fully conveys the tragedy and travesty being wrought upon us by the Big Men who neither know nor care. 😢💔
My husband and I noticed the same thing and it’s just the two of us and it is gone up to where we noticed it. I’m so thankful that we are not destitute. We can afford it but we see that there’s some people that can’t and my heart breaks for them! I give money to Food banks I give money to the Los Angeles mission. I try to help where I can and like I said my heart breaks through them and even if we get a new administration in there prices rarely go down. If they do, it’s so minimal it doesn’t make a difference really. It goes up $.25 but it only comes down $.10 so it still is up by $.15 and people don’t see that. They go “see it’s come down”but not to what it was. I think with a lot of people, math was not the strong point. But we’ve got to keep on putting 1 foot in front of the other going forward, and hopefully we can take a deep breath, soon!
Man I love your writing
Thank you so much for those wonderful compliments!!
Thank you!!
No, thank you Tom. I live in New Zealand. A very different place but now suffering under similar crushing agendas. Your writing has an extraordinary quality. So evocative and sad but full of joyous humanity. It makes me think of the welsh ‘hiraeth’ and the Maori ‘wairua’. There is in your writing and its content an elusive sense of warmth and nourishment. Go well out there all of you. We share your pain in these brutal times for so many.
Nicely written. Thanks😎
Thank you!!
"A million dollars a seat". Something has to give.
My first reaction was to be judgy. We eat very little meat and zero beef. We buy oatmeal by the twenty pound bag (I’m too lazy to flake the oats.). I make all our breads, cakes, cookies, etc. It’s much cheaper and healthier.
Our neighbor, a rancher claims his beeves are at an all time high, price wise, but he has fiber trees to fall back on.
Our local grocery store put out signs claiming prices are much lower than they used to be. BS! Coffee went from $6.99 to $9.99 in March 2025. That same bag is now $11.99. Good thing I stocked up before trump took office. We could eat mostly from our property, but I really don’t like kale or milking a goat.
Our lives have changed such that we plan way ahead. No more eating out, no new clothes, no travel. Hmmm..
If you see someone stealing food-
no you didn’t.
I read the post in which your nephew explained why he'd voted for tRump -- that was the first I'd seen, and why I subscribed -- and now, after reading this, I have to ask:
Does he regret that vote?
I think he regrets how Trump treated his vote
I gathered that from your piece — but there’s a difference between regretting how tRump treated his vote and regretting the vote that allowed tRump to do the mistreating … so to speak.
I’m not seeking a mea culpa from your nephew: his life, views on politics, and votes are none of my business, but I just can’t wrap my head around the idea of being lied to in every way — of having the trust and hope he put into his vote for tRump be so egregiously violated — then not regretting the vote that enabled every bad thing that flowed from it.
All I can think of is that he must have felt he had no other choice — and that much I can understand. I think most of us have been in situations where we saw no good options, then made the decision for whatever seemed to be the least bad choice.
That’s a bad, and sad, place to be.
I lifted the paywall so you could check out https://joadt.substack.com/p/nine-miles?r=5ccpro&utm_medium=ios I think it is explained here.
No need to lift the paywall - this was the first piece of yours I read, and I immediately signed on as a paying subscriber … but thanks!
Some questions have no good answers, so I’ll leave it there and look forward to your next post.
Thanks for your support!!