Brian Wellmeier
Last week, I reached for the sour cream on the top shelf of the refrigerator. I’d just bought a new container of the stuff on the way home. I thought I didn’t have any, but I had just a dab left at the bottom.
I’d planned to make quesadillas that evening and I’d already bought the chicken and tortillas before I had to return for sour cream. At the grocery store, most of the shelves were bare that day and I’d snatched up the second-to-last one left. It was a few cents more expensive than the last time I bought some.
The checkout line was long as I stood waiting to check out. At the front was a man with his child and three items in a hand-held cart. He shook his head once before he paid with a card and left with a family of three I later saw exit the parking lot in a tan-colored Tahoe.
We both needed gas, apparently, because I was then filling my car with gasoline at a pump behind him. One of his children wept while we both watched the ever-increasing digits rising as we topped off our tanks. He shook his head again, and I sighed as the nozzle clicked full at more than $60.
On the gas pump was one of those stickers of Joe Biden pointing with the words, “I did that!” and back behind the wheel, cranking the ignition, a news station on Sirius XM had an exhaustive segment blaming Donald Trump for the nation’s economic woes.
All breeds of the human race have their own logic, reasoning and blame for the rising rate of inflation, I thought. I remember talk of this happening going as far back as 2009, when the first phase of quantitative easing was initiated by the Federal Reserve to pull the U.S. out of the Great Recession – a program which was continued by the private central bank in excess under the leadership of both parties and only recently tapered as the FED moves to raise interest rates.
The powers of the FED aren’t questioned often, and when they are, it’s often by the party not in power.
I thought JFK had said something about this before he was assassinated. People say that, but people say a lot of things, so maybe not. I think Woodrow Wilson, who signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, was more specific when he said, “I am a most unhappy man – unwittingly I have ruined my country” in the days leading up to his death.
Who knows if this is true, or if his brain was mush in those final days? But that’s all I was thinking as I merged with traffic heading east through Athens, each of us traveling along the same road, stepping on identical pedals to propel ourselves to and from destinations in our gas-powered boxes like packaged ants in constant collective motion.
Partisan bickering of factions divided by a line drawn between those yelling on the left and right side of it continued on the television as I turned the knob to heat a cast iron pan on the stovetop. Then I discovered the dab of sour cream left at the bottom of the near-empty container, a thin film of mold on the surface. I slid open the trash bin, went to drop it on, and hesitated.
I looked at the new container, back at the old one. I thought to scrape off the top and use the rest until I saw Rocky – an Australian Shepherd pit bull mix – starie up at me in befuddlement, as if to say, “Are you really, actually going to do this?”
He was across the room and I beckoned him, but he remained seated there by the bar.
Again I thought back to Woodrow Wilson. “If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face,” he once said. “You should go home and examine your conscience.”
I did that, and within the dome of my skull echoed a quote by JFK:
“Do not pray for easy lives, pray to be stronger…”
Yeah, I thought. Inflation or not. you are better than this. Examine your conscience. Discard the mold-festered specimen.
A few cents isn’t worth the last of my dignity – perhaps the only thing we have left in this extortionate Year of Our Lord, 2022. At least not yet.
Brian Wellmeier is a staff writer for The Northeast Georgian. Reach him at 706-778-4215 or
bwellmeier@TheNortheastGeorgian.com.