High Gas Prices Take A Bite Out Of "Meals On Wheels"

Back when I was in college I had job working in the dietary section of the public hospital in my hometown. One of the things we used to do was put together Meals On Wheels so they could then be delivered to needly elderly people in the community. It was a nice feeling to know that part of your job involved actually helping someone.

I hadn't thought about the Meals On Wheels program since those days, until I read this distressing story from a local South Dakota television station:

The high price of fuel not only affects families and businesses, but non-profit agencies as well. Volunteer drivers who deliver food to low-income elderly people are looking for answers from members of Congress.

Meals On Wheels driver Gayle Sagmoe has a VIP riding shotgun on her route: South Dakota Congresswoman Kristi Noem.

"It's the number-one issue that our office hears about right now, is gas prices," Rep. Kristi Noem, R-South Dakota said.

The 500-plus volunteer drivers with Meals On Wheels furnish their own vehicles and pay their own gas.

"I go probably average of 12-15-18 miles a day for a route; at $4 a gallon that's not going to go very far," Sagmoe said.

Drivers like Sagmoe worry that if gas prices climb too high, she may have to cut back on deliveries or stop volunteering altogether.

Unfortunately, the main interviewee for this article is looking for help in all the wrong places:

"I hope it doesn't because volunteering for me is the joy of my life, so I'm hoping and crossing my fingers that somebody will fix something and we can get prices back down," Sagmoe said.

Meals On Wheels hopes lawmakers like Noem can do the heavy lifting toward finding a solution to high prices.

"People are asking us, 'Why?' And simply, it's the uncertainty in the world and that we've got a lot of resources out in the country that we're not accessing," Noem said.

Sorry, Ms. Sagmoe, but your dingbat Congresswoman is far more interested in trying to score political points against Obama than she is in helping you. Because otherwise, she would explain to you that there is not much she, Obama or any other of our national "leaders" can do to bring down the price of gasoline in this era of peak oil. If she really wanted to help, she would suggest that the government provide a fuel subsidy for the Meals On Wheels program, because high gas prices are not only here to stay, they are going to get even worse in the future. But she doesn't want to do anything that might be construed as "socialism," so she'd rather look you in the eye and lie her ass off about all of the bountiful supposed resources America still has that for some inexplicable reason we refuse to access.


Bonus: Just because this story is from South Dakota, here is "Badlands"