At the grocery in La Porte, I passed the dairy case and saw a hand-lettered sign taped to the cooler door: “Limit two per customer.” Cream cheese nearly gone. Bottled water stacked low. A woman near me pushed four twelve-packs of soda into her cart and muttered, “Biden’s America,” loud enough for others to hear.
Shortages aren’t new. I’ve seen storms clean out stores in hours. Ike left aisles bare, carts loaded with bread and batteries. A trucking strike years back meant waiting for deliveries that never came. But those shortages had clear causes and clear ends. This one feels like a thousand tiny fractures in a fragile chain. A pandemic rerouted cargo. Factories idled. Ports clogged. Every weakness became visible, not for a day, but in waves.
Politicians don’t waste such moments. They assign blame in speeches, point fingers on cable news, and turn every empty shelf into a weapon. The other side responds with its own explanations and its own reassurances. Neither reaches the person staring at doubled meat prices or the parent who can’t find baby formula. Explanations don’t fill a cart.
What gnaws at me is the misuse of language. People call inconvenience “collapse.” They treat a missing brand of cream cheese as if it signals the end of America. Collapse isn’t a bare shelf. Collapse is when food doesn’t come back. Collapse is when the trucks stop running for good, when the grid fails and stays failed, when the water from your tap isn’t safe and the city can’t fix it. We’ve had glimpses of that kind of failure here before — boil-water notices after storms, pumps down, generators coughing in the dark — and those moments teach a hard lesson: it isn’t a meme, and it isn’t solved by a slogan.
If you want to measure the moment, don’t count memes. Count redundancies. Does the refinery have parts on hand? Does the distribution center have drivers? Does the port have clearance to move ships past the channel after a fog delay? A system with no slack breaks whenever reality leans on it. That’s what we’re feeling now — not the end of the world, but the cost of pretending efficiency is the same as resilience.
That hasn’t stopped the full mouths at the end of the aisle. They complain loudest with carts heaped highest. They shout about tyranny while tapping card to reader, while gas pumps click full at the station across the street. It’s theater — until it isn’t. And when the day comes that shelves stay empty and pumps run dry, none of the practiced outrage will help lift a pallet, fix a valve, or move a barge.
The difference matters. Because reality keeps score, and it doesn’t take attendance at rallies. It shows up in hours without power, days without fuel, weeks without clean water. That’s where language should be precise, because precision is what keeps neighbors alive when slogans won’t.