Like all criminal defense lawyers, I appreciate the importance limiting the power of the police in a free society.
But this is a day to be thankful for the noble mission and commitment of all safety officers, health care workers, and first responders, to be there at times like now when we need them, when it’s not easy for them and for their families.
Thank you.
Please share widely!
I’m going to add grocery store workers as “frontline public servants”.
Saw this after I posted. Thanks Charley! Yes, as one of those workers, I can tell you that we are giving it all we have and for the most part, our customers are appreciative, with the occasional nasty person exception.
I hope the managers are getting trained in how to protect them.
And let’s not forget those working at food markets, stocking the shelves,preparing the fish, meats, vegetables, running the checkouts, and having to put up with behaviors of some people that is beyond the pale.
Those workers were mentioned prominently by multiple people on both MSNBC and CNN during tonight’s primary/pandemic coverage.
Perhaps a tiny blessing of this mess will be an increased awareness of the public of how central our grocery stores and their staff and suppliers are to the functioning of ALL of our first-world civilization.
New England will be in a food panic within about two weeks of a total shutdown of our transportation network. Some analysts say even less than two weeks.
When we’re done with all this there will be a huge change in the way food enters our homes. We’ll drive up to windowless cement warehouses to pick up (or have delivered) large cardboard boxes (recyclable) of robot assembled orders. Paid for on-line.
It will cut down on food waste and be more efficient.
I have always maintained a 2-3 months supply of food (on a rotating basis), bland, repetitive canned goods mostly, freeze dried camping food also. One thing you all should get now is a water purification system (RapidPur, Sawyer) and keep it on hand.
The media thrives on creating hysteria but most everyone will get through this.
I think this picture ignores the reality of reducing our carbon footprint.
We might indeed forgo retail grocery stores in favor of some sort of distribution facilities. I think we’re more likely to collect our food from small and mobile units — trailers and boxcars — and I think we’ll be shifting from heavily processed (and therefore high-impact) to locally-sourced fresh food.
Did you know that in the first half the twentieth century, before trucks, refrigerated boxcars were used as food distribution points? A reefer filled with perishables would be spotted on a siding in a town for a day, scheduled in advance. People would buy goods and produce at the door of the car and carry it home. At the end of the day, the car would be moved overnight to the next siding in the next town. And so on until the car was empty.
I think we’ll be consuming root vegetables and potatoes in whatever is left of winter, leafy vegetables in the spring and fall, and whatever we can grow and harvest in the summer.
Canned and freeze-dried foods consume enormous amounts of energy to process and then more to transport. A better alternative is to grow vegetables in raised beds on railroad flatcars in temperate regions (New Jersey and south on the East Coast), then move the entire car/train to New England for distribution as the harvest comes in — sort of a mobile farm-share.
People lived in New England for a long time before we had railroads, trucks and supermarkets. Significantly, this region supported a relative handful of people then as compared to now. Our challenge is to feed our population while managing the overall carbon footprint of all the things we consume.
A lot of other considerations seem to have been ignored, but I’m not sure the solution is a trip back to the 19th century either.
A technology that reduces by a thousand-fold the energy needed to move a ton of food is worth considering no matter how old it is. I remind you that in the 19th century, freight was moved by massive steam engines that burned dirty coal or oil and made no effort whatsoever to restrict emissions of anything.
Most of Europe moves rail freight with electrified locomotives that use power generated from renewable sources.
A huge factor in the overlarge current carbon footprint of our food — especially our vegetables — is that we produce the food in Southern California and then truck it across the country to New England (some of it starts in South America). Or worse, we ship it by air freight.
Meanwhile, the produce itself has to be picked raw so that it doesn’t spoil en-route. So it needs to be genetically modified — either by direct manipulation or by careful hybridization — so that it doesn’t bruise, ripens on the shelf, and lasts as long as possible on the shelf once ripened. The result is produce that has no taste or smell at all.
It seems to me that we should be eagerly pursuing any and every technology that allows us to eat produce that is fresh, tastes good, and has minimal carbon footprint.
There is nothing 19th-century about that.
Uprated for the emergency preparedness advice. I think we could all stand to learn about that.
I don’t think anyone’s talking about a shut down of all transportation. Even the most extreme lockdown proposals I’ve heard exempt essentials like grocery stores and their vendors.
Understood. I’m just emphasizing the importance of grocery stores and the people who staff them to our way of life.
Too few of us realize how completely dependent we are on our interconnections to each other.
I’m struck how I’m living in a former farming town that obviously sprawled out after the war. There are a few barn structures left in the back of some of the older houses. My mother has told me tales of her grandfather growing a considerable amount of vegetables in his backyard on Sherman St in North Cambridge and of my own grandfather using those tomatoes to make his “gravy” for the meatball subs he sold in his shop. Farm to table before it was cool. They did a lot of canning during the Depression, the Irish side even did a lot of distilling (but don’t tell Special Agent Ness). All lost arts we should return to.
On my wife’s side I had never felt healthier or thinner after living on her family’s farm in the Philippines for three idillc weeks. One learns to appreciate pork a lot more after helping kill and skin a pig, and you
learn that all the parts are tasty and essential. When this crisis passes, maybe we can adapt some of the good we take out of it to live simpler lives.
Let’s also add the service workers…. in many cases, they are the ones at greatest risk, for little compensation. A friend of mine said she is being paid an extra $2 per hour for her supermarket job. She didn’t sign up to be a hero, but she is.