The family gathering at the recent funeral down in New York City spawned another reunion up in New England.\u00a0 A gaggle of my siblings gathered and we broke bread at a local diner that had a sign that touted their fried clams and ice cream.\u00a0 Quite a combination.\u00a0 But we had neither of these.\u00a0 I had a Reuben and a cup of coffee and the rest of the crew went up and down the menu.\u00a0 Somebody even got the pot roast and mashed potatoes.\u00a0 And as we sat there and enjoyed our fare several of us remarked on the virtues of a good local diner and the fact that they seem to have disappeared from some locales where they were formerly ubiquitous.\u00a0 Brooklyn used to have a ton of Greek diners and you could always get baklava at midnight after a movie or some other outing.\u00a0 Now they\u2019re all gone, or so it seems.<\/p>\n
This being New England, baklava was not on the menu.\u00a0 But this diner was one of a very few locations within a twenty mile radius that would be open much after 1 am. \u00a0And they had very courteous service which is also quite rare nowadays.\u00a0 One very strange business practice, they\u2019re a cash only establishment.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s another reason to hate the Biden administration and the Democrats.\u00a0 The COVID lockdowns bankrupted so many small businesses including restaurants.\u00a0 Sure, you can always go to Mickey D\u2019s when you\u2019re coming off a late shift or a date but the local diner was so much more welcoming a sight.\u00a0 A place where you could order an actual burger and finish with some pie and ice cream.\u00a0 That\u2019s how I remembered the world back in the day before mega-corporations finished off all the mom-and-pop shops in America.\u00a0 And sure, there are plenty of good chain restaurants that serve good food and do employ the local kids as wait staff.\u00a0 But history has some bearing on it.\u00a0 The place we went to eat has been around for seventy years.\u00a0 The grandchildren of the original owner run the place.\u00a0 We\u2019ve been going to it for over thirty years.\u00a0 Is the food four star?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 Is it good.\u00a0 Plenty good.\u00a0 Are the prices fair?\u00a0 All things considered, yes.\u00a0 The food is fresh.\u00a0 The silverware is clean and the waitresses are good humored.\u00a0 What else could you want?<\/p>\n
I know that Donald Trump has an enormous to-do list on his plate.\u00a0 He\u2019s got a raft of executive orders a mile long and he\u2019s battling everyone from the presidents of Denmark and Panama, to the deep state, to that dopey lesbian bishop in Washington.\u00a0 But if he needs another item to add to his list, I\u2019d say he should figure out a way to boost small businesses.\u00a0 The billionaire class has beaten the snot out of small and even not so small businesses over the course of the last thirty years.\u00a0 Amazon alone has killed off the downtown retail district of every city and town in the country.\u00a0 And with it has gone any hope of ever meeting up with your neighbors.\u00a0 Probably grocery shopping is the last gasp of that.\u00a0 And even there Amazon is doing its darndest to conquer all.\u00a0 I know I must sound like a Luddite but I think anti-monopoly laws are there for a reason.<\/p>\n
And if there\u2019s no way back then something fundamental has to be done to force people in the same locale; town or neighborhood, to spend some time together talking to each other about the details of their community; their kids\u2019 schools, the trials and tribulations of their police force and their fire dept. and all the pot holes that the road department hasn\u2019t fixed and all the other things that need attention.\u00a0 The problem is we\u2019re all too busy or too lazy or too anti-social.\u00a0 But people are going to have to start solving these problems.\u00a0 If we leave all of this to the \u201cexperts\u201d they are going to tell us how to live and we really won\u2019t like the rules they come up with.\u00a0 In fact, we\u2019re already there.\u00a0 It\u2019s time people woke up and looked around at the default setting of the New America.\u00a0 It\u2019s not pretty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The family gathering at the recent funeral down in New York City spawned another reunion up in New England.\u00a0 A gaggle of my siblings gathered<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3366,1263],"tags":[2374,4790],"class_list":["post-32117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-life-in-dunwich","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-monopoly","tag-small-business"],"yoast_head":"\n