Op-Ed Columns

It's been a stinker of a week.

South Texas was wiped off the map.

The federal government has bailed out everyone except those shuttered fast-food joints along Quintard Avenue.

Everyone panicked last Friday — including me — and now gas is harder to find than a touchdown at an Auburn game, and the small puddles of petrol we do have are worth a semester's tuition in Tuscaloosa.

The economy is on life support; beating, but faint. No one has extra cash. Businesses can't sell their products, people have no money to buy anything anyway, and bananas and milk cost more than diamonds and silk. Every day we greet sunrise with the expectation that the day will be better, but it isn't.

What a depressing, demoralizing week.

Things are going to improve, right?

Gas prices will drop, right?

Food prices will fall below our mortgage payments, right?

The stock market will rebound, right?

Tuition costs will stop rising, and struggling businesses will stop laying off good people, and cities will stop having to pick their fiscal poison — paying police officers or renovating aging school buildings, right?

The doom and gloom of 2008 will morph into something bright and rosy in 2009, right?

Yeah, right.

Let's admit this much. For some folks in Calhoun County — those who have jobs, who work hard, who save when they can — the realities are dreadful, but they could be worse. You understand this isn't a pimple-on-the-cheek problem; it's not going away in a few days. There is no magic ointment.

Nevertheless, you have a spouse, and kids, and a not-so-new house, and only a few cataclysmic complaints. Your money doesn't go nearly as far as it did a year ago, two years ago. You're watching what you're doing, where your money's going, more than you ever have. You're not happy, though you're also not preparing to emigrate to Ontario, either.

You're not destitute — yet. Others are.

It's all about how it affects you. That's human nature, and it's OK to view it that way. That's how I feel. And that's also one reason why some of us prefer living in everyday America — the towns of Calhoun County — instead of chasing the dream of St. Elmo's Fire and moving to the big city, where people are numbers and souls don't mean as much to managers as does the bottom line.

Just make money, baby, they say.

Everything's connected. It's the economic version of dominos; this piece falls, which knocks over another piece, which knocks over another piece, and it doesn't stop until all is laid waste. Economists with Ph.D.s will tell you that's why you should tremble at night, because Bear Stearns needed rescuing, because Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, because D.C. now owns AIG.

No, not really.

What's bothersome is that more and more students at Jacksonville State — a regional university that should be affordable to its students — and our community colleges are finding the cost unaffordable. And that most Calhoun County cities — there's one notable exception — are preparing budgets that can hardly keep the lights on. And that the county's budget is no different. And that our hard-working neighbors who are ready to retire can't; their portfolios have leaked too much cash. And that car salesmen can't sell cars, and that real-estate agents can't sell many houses, and that more and more people in this county — not those on Wall Street, not those at Bear Stearns or AIG — are having to choose: buy that gallon of milk or put a gallon of gas in the tank.

And what about Calhoun County's lowest-income residents? Their plight? Tell that story to Anniston's incoming mayor, or to this district's congressman, or to November's winner.

That's why we should tremble. Not because of the problems in Washington, not because of the troubles in New York, but because of the realities here, in our homes, on our streets, in our own work places. Yeah, we get the domino effect.

I desperately want to believe that this isn't the calamitous, end-of-our-nation-as-we-know-it episode that some fear. Surely, it's not. Panic, as seen last Friday, is viral, impossible to stop. And the truth is that the towns of this county have their recent economic success stories: new banks popping up like so many mushrooms along Quintard, new retail developments in Jacksonville, the old-but-true reality of Oxford business.

But the cooling air of September is thick with concern. Like smog, you can see it. Frowns are many, smiles are few. We all need a few days of calm, and hope that next week will be better. It must.