Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Monitor and Post

 
by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

I had a call from an old friend last night who wanted to know my reaction to all of the bullshit currently being spewed by the new administration in Washington,   When I told her that I was trying to ignore it, she seemed less than thrilled with my response.  My friend, who is slightly younger than me, is an activist and has been since she was an undergrad in college in the 1960's, and passiveness is not a factor in her genetic makeup.

My friend said she has joined a ladies' resistance group that meets for open discussion about the current abysmal state of affairs in our nation's capital.  She described the women of the group as all having gray hair except for four, so they obviously have a lot of experience and history from which to draw their opinions of the mess in DC.

Apparently this group of senior ladies from the St. Louis area are going to do more than just meet and talk.  They plan on being active in their communities, and one of their first projects is to begin monitoring and recording grocery prices, with individual members keeping track of certain foodstuffs (milk, eggs, bread, peanut butter, etc) on a weekly basis and then create social media posts as the prices inevitably rise. 

Republicans, and particularly the incoming President, talked about bringing down the price of some groceries (such as eggs) during the campaign, but now that they are actually trying to govern, groceries seem to have been pushed to the back of the legislative shelf and the focus has turned to harassing immigrants, wrecking American health care, and invading Greenland.  Eggs are no longer a priority.

Well, at some point people will need to be reminded of how things were in this country when the new guys took over - and how they have changed over time.  What better way to do that than to monitor local grocery prices and then report the situation in local social media posts.

Here's another way that could be accomplished:  buy the same assortment of staples weekly and monitor their costs.    For instance, every Friday evening after work, go to the same grocery store and buy the same bag of foodstuffs, perhaps a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, and two pounds of hamburger.  Keep and date receipts and make tallies per item and per bag monthly.  That would be a far more telling statistic regarding the local economy than anything the government puts out, and far easier for most of us to understand.  The monthly price for a gallon of gas at one particular gas station would also be very reflective of the local economy.

Politicians are always quick to talk the talk, but community price watchdogs would also be a strong encouragement for them to walk the walk.

Each of us should commit to doing something to bring about positive change during these awful times, and we should all work at mastering social media because that is where the people who need to be educated are lurking.

Resist and persist.

Monitor and post.

And Pa Rock should pull his head out of the sand and reconnect with the world around him.  It may no longer be about him, but it sure as hell is still about the health, happiness, and futures of his children and grandchildren!

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