AUGUST 2, 2021 – On Sunday we—my wife, son Byron, daughter-in-law Mylène, and I—made a Home Depot run in Middletown, CT, followed by a near total buy-out of current inventory at an adjacent Price Chopper grocery store. I was familiar with “Home Depot”; I’d never heard of “Price Chopper” As we grabbed “price-chopped” stuff off the shelves, I pondered the food supply and distribution chain.
For millennia, people survived by yanking grapes off the vine, fish from the water, and game from the woods or the savannah. Over time, civilizations learned to farm and trade to create food surpluses. No longer in survival mode, societies allocated their resources to pursuits beyond food gathering. Eventually, we wound up with online gambling. Quite an arc of progress. It’s time, I say, to leverage our development.
While inside PriceChoppers, I considered that despite our country’s divides and fractures; despite places as dichotomous as Wyoming and Delaware residing within the same national boundaries, one finds the same brands of bread and mayonnaise, yoghurt and crackers in Middletown as one sees in Minneapolis—for close to the same price. The gathering routine is the same as well—pushing carts down aisles to the rhythm of consumer-psychology researched music.
Food gathering is just one of the many facets of our lives that have become uniform across this diverse, sprawling land.
I then thought about the resurgence of Covid-19 in under-vaccinated regions of the country and how federalism and our cultural aversion to “government” telling us what to do overrides a sensible, unified approach to a common threat. Thanks to our libertarian mindset, the leading indicator of national well-being—life expectancy—dropped during the first year of the pandemic. Yet our nihilistic embrace of New Hampshire’s motto continues. “Live free or die,” still means we’d rather die than get gently pricked by a needle.
If we’re prisoners of our libertarianism, however, perhaps our escape is via another American trait: shareholder value. Maybe large publicly owned corporations, which progressives are so quick to denigrate, can fill the void created by 250 years of “Don’t Tread on Me!” The Home Depots and the Syscos, the PepsiCos, and the JBSs (the latter three being among the largest food distributors (by revenues) in the U.S.) of the country can “lay down the [company policy]”: No vaccine, no job.
Perhaps I can dream beyond vaccines. Maybe the Walmarts and the Amazons, disregarding parochial norms, will take the lead in dissembling racial injustice. The source of this drive, so goes my dream, will be demographic trends combined with economic necessity. The drivers will be a tight labor force and growing consumer base in which people of color become an ever-increasing majority. Moreover, in the quest for market share, gerrymandering is counterproductive. To survive and thrive, large business enterprises will have no choice but to adapt in ways our political system can’t.
Looming over all: climate change. Forget Congress. Look to Corporations, again, because their workers and customers—and profit motive—will demand it.
So goes the dream.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
