Gutted Like A Fish

This morning I was the guest preacher in a small rural area of Virginia. I drove two hours through back roads to get there. It is what would normally be considered a nice drive. The problem was not the distance, but what I drove through to get there. Three towns, with former thriving businesses on each side of the road were gutted and empty.

These towns at one point no doubt had been thriving small towns with thriving businesses. Businesses that employed people and businesses that functioned and kept the towns alive as the kind of place people enjoyed visiting and shopping in. The kind of places people poured their life's blood into over the span of many years.

So what happened to the United States away from the large Interstates? I have driven nearly every state and when I decide to get off the freeway, it is the same everywhere from coast to coast. The country has been gutted like a fish. The businesses in the center of all of these towns are shut down, boarded up, and filled with old refuse and junk. Why did all these businesses across the US get shuttered? Did people lose their passion for business and ownership?

Or did the landscape and rules change and go against them?

Do you know I never went in a Walmart until about 1998? We did not have them where I grew up. When I finally did it was so filled with cheap junk I was not interested in what they sold, outside of the occasional CD. Now there is a Walmart or a Dollar General within a short drive of almost anywhere you go. In the wake of the expansion of these stores and their favorable treatment regarding land and taxes, local business and employment is destroyed.

Certainly Walmart is not the only issue. The Internet and free shipping has played a part, but so has the devaluing of currency. The stock in all those shops lost value while is stayed on the shelves. Large businesses could afford to use the barely there replacement model due to higher turnover, while smaller shops could not operate their inventory with as much as latitude.

Throw in steadily rising minimum wages and ever growing costs of managing the tax burdens levied in State capitals and Washington DC and the small town business cannot compete. They lose their young to bigger cities and lose their property to taxes and inflation. The cities of the United States have become giant plantations filled with tax slaves while the rural areas are choked of their vibrancy and become bedroom communities where once productive land is turned into giant ghettos where tax/wage slaves are piled thick as thieves required to commute ever longer distances due to affordability.

The United States is now the United State. Opportunity is rapidly disappearing and bondage to high bills and debt is quickly becoming the norm. People cannot vote themselves out of this problem, but they can end their belief in the uniqueness of America. Those days are over. People need to wake up to the reality that was openly brought into being.

Will you stop complying or will you continue trading your sweat for their equity to grow?