Catching Up WithTrucks

Long time since the keypad hit the blog page. Seven months.

Why no blogging, commenting or musings here? Busy learning a new trade made stopping by here tough to regularly accomplish for me. Also, I can say some shit never changes. Rants, pleas, statistics, preaching, cajoling, anecdotes and the like just wore out after awhile.

Need affordable health care? Want jobs with benefits? Want clean water? Like music, books and art but wonder why all things culture got packaged into a phone? Me, too!

Another thing, Facebook knocked and I answered. Stories that cropped up eventually popped up on my status posts. Quick comments or a brief explanation as to why I felt an issue should be addressed one way gobbled up some time and staying in touch with friends for brief moments in a day seemed enough.

My new trade is booking hauls for trucks as an independent agent for a national logistics/freight company. Very interesting days, and opens up a whole new world dialog on what passes for life in the slow lanes. Driving 10 to 12 hours a day making a living exacts a hefty toll for those who connect American commerce. Most people just take for granted what's  on the shelves of the WalMarts, Targets, Costcos, Krogers, Safeways and Trader Joe's of America, and never think of the long hours of hauling all those products across the battered and bruised highways and byways of this big country.

Once upon a time, in a stranger and more archaic version of this country when things were just as shitty, but the gap between the rich and poor was not quite so great, truck drivers used citizen band radios to communicate with each other on the roads. CB radios became the rage for the gullible and fad driven masses of this country. I worked at an electronics shop in the mid seventies for awhile, and high fidelity components were a very small drop in the corporate bucket compared to what CB radios and all the paraphernalia that went with them poured in. CB radios gave the world a glimpse of what social networking would become on the Internet and all its little devices. Shocking newness meets rude, profane and eventual turnoff.

Trucks and truckers were cool by the mid to late seventies. They even had a bunch of pop tunes and movies made to celebrate the trade and the people living the nomadic anti-corporate independent lifestyle. The bad guys menaced in very different garb and from very different backgrounds in the fictional world when trucks flashed briefly on the pop scene. Bad guys were commies and the mob back then.

When I think of it now, maybe the mob just won the war. We know what happened to the commies, and they did not win. By the 1980s all the anti-trust rules were being tossed, and this just after the big Bell phone monopoly breakup of the 1970s. Trucks and their drivers were yesterdays big thing. By the 1990s the kings of the freight lanes were being forced to pee into little testing pots by the roadside for the privilege to drive all those marvelous low priced WalMart goods across the country. Can't trust 'em, can't trust anybody became the rule in America.  The unions, even the mighty Teamsters, possessed all the clout of an aged emphysema patient trying to protect jobs and benefits turf. 

The new millennium is past ten now, and trucks are the fragile glue holding commerce together in this broke-down palace of a nation. The guys and gals I talk to on a daily basis are some of America's last independents. They drive or find and post freight across America as independent contractors. Some are incorporated. Some are sole proprietors. All struggle, and many without basic health coverage with little to no retirement savings. You can't raise rates if too few in the general public can afford the hike. It's where we hobble today. Thanks for stopping by.