Who will you thank at Thanksgiving?

Most people will give thanks for their Thanksgiving dinner to God and to the preparers.  Consider all the others who helped make your dinner possible.

First, consider the people who built the roads for you to get to the store and all those who paid taxes for those roads, both now and long ago.

Consider the people at the grocery store who stocked the shelves, coolers, and freezers with all the food you bought and who checked you out and bagged your groceries.

Consider the people who drove the trucks on the above-mentioned roads to deliver the food to the grocery store.

Consider the people in the warehouses who unloaded the goods from one set of trucks coming from processors, stacked them, and then loaded them on another set of trucks for delivery to local stores.

Consider the people who drove the trucks on the above-mentioned roads to deliver the goods to a warehouse.  Sometimes they are driving long hours under a deadline.

Consider the people who processed the food at a cannery, a packager, or a slaughterhouse.  Many of them work under conditions and wages you wouldn’t tolerate.

Consider the people who drove the trucks on the above-mentioned roads to deliver the produce or animals to a cannery, a packager, or a slaughterhouse.

Consider the state and federal inspectors who try to enforce those “burdensome” regulations so that you have safe food, uncontaminated by unwanted organisms and chemicals.

Consider the environmentalists who want to reduce the contaminants in our air and water that could make your food less healthy.

Consider the people who picked the fruit and vegetables that are on your Thanksgiving table.  Some of them worked in air-conditioned harvester cabs; others of them picked by hand so long that they wondered if they could stand straight at the end of the day.  Some of them owned the land they worked and kept any profits.  Some worked seasonally at wages you wouldn’t tolerate.

Consider the people who ran the farms.  Some of them were corporate managers and some of them were resident farmer-owners.  These latter took many risks to produce your food besides the general risk of physical injury.  Was the weather going to be just right to give a great crop?  Were the market prices going to be favorable enough to pay their bank loans and still have money left over to live on until the next crops came in?

Consider the local bankers who made many of the loans to farmers.  Did they evaluate the risk properly so that the bank would have enough profit to continue the next year?  Now savings account interest is a joke, but when it was a decent return would the banker have enough profit to pass on to his or her savings customers?

Consider all those who contribute indirectly to your having an enjoyable meal.

If the weather is bad, consider all the snowplow operators who work long, weird hours so that you or your guests could get safely to wherever your Thanksgiving meal will be.

Consider the police who are out patrolling while you travel or are eating.

Consider the firefighters who may have to jump up from their meal at moment’s notice because somebody knocked over a candle or burned themselves with hot food.

Consider the complexity behind some of our simple pleasures.  Without the efforts of hundreds and thousands of people we may never meet, we would have to go out ourselves to grow and harvest what we enjoy in good company in a warm house.

Also posted on the Reader Weekly website at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2013/11/21/2479_party_of_one-6.

The new buzzword: "efficiency"

Today's Star Tribune had yet another op-ed piece calling for government efficiency. See "MnDOT must work smarter for savings". This time it was for MnDOT to be more efficient in keeping our roads in good shape. Oh, yes, it was by a member of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce.

Whenever, I see calls for efficiencies in government, I read calls for doing more with less money.

If people want efficiency in transportation, they should be calling for more public transit and more trains. After all, it is more efficient to have one driver transporting 30 to 50 people than 30 drivers transporting 30 people and to have one engineer transporting 100 to 400 people between cities than 100 drivers transporting 100 people.

What these modes don't provide is convenience, which is one measure of effectiveness. Since we choose convenience as an important part of our transportation infra-structure, we should be willing to consider all the costs of such convenience.

One of the costs is that the convenience entices more and more people to drive, so much so, that more collective travel withers. As more and more people drive, we need more lanes and roads. "Build it and they will come." As we need more lanes and roads, we need more money. As we need more money, we need more taxes. Oops! No new taxes. If no new taxes, shall we have no new lanes and no new roads?