This empty case, and the sign that accompanies it, we’re at my local grocery store today. I don’t post this to put the store on blast personally; I post this to make a statement about the state of things in my country right now.

The whole world is short staffed right now, primarily because a lot of people don’t want to go back to work. I understood the reasoning for a while. The few of Covid was something I’ve never experienced before in my life. In addition, unemployment benefits plus additional Covid pay were more than what some people were making l; resulting in people simply walking away from their jobs. However those Covid benefits have ended and people – just judging from the “eye test” people still aren’t going back to work.

If a discussion about raising minimum wage and raising pay for middle-class workers is what we need to have, I’m all for it. But I for one I’m sick and tired of walking into grocery stores or restaurants and getting substandard service because some people are choosing to not go back to work

I know there has been a lot of talk in America about raising the federal minimum wage to $15 (US) per hour; I’m starting to wonder if this is A game of chicken that workers are playing with these big businesses. That is to say, I’m wondering if they are staying away from certain jobs in the hopes of forcing the businesses’ hand and moving toward a $15 an hour minimum wage.

To those of you who have returned to work and those who have worked all through Covid, God bless you all. I but I for one I’m sick and tired of walking into stores and seeing empty store shelves. I hate the fact that this society, that our grandparents generation turned into the Premier world superpower is slowly becoming a Third World country.

In addition to a lot of goods and services becoming more scarce, the things that are available are getting more expensive. The cost of living is going up in America, and wages are not increasingly.

And maybe that’s the way it’s going to be from now on. Maybe America won’t be “the land of milk and honey“ anymore. Maybe this is the “new normal” that everyone keeps talking about. As Christopher Plummer said in Star Trek six “if there is to be a brave New World, our generation will have a hardest time living in it.“

When he ran for president in 1992, Bill Clinton said “this will be the first generation of Americans to be worse off than their parents were.“ We are on our way to that right now.

We’re all scared of Covid. And I think we all know that working class Americans aren’t paid enough money for what we do. But I can’t continue to sustain this level of paranoia and fear we’ve had for 22 months and counting. It’s just too much on the human psyche.

End of rant.