It can always be worse

From C:

C's always telling me, It could be worse.

In today's Globe:

About 100,000 low-income households in Massachusetts have received gas and electric shutoff notices because of unpaid bills, an anti-poverty agency said today, as it urged those affected to apply for federal and state fuel assistance before a mid-May deadline. Gas and electric companies are barred from sending out the shutoff notices during the winter months. The moratorium expires May 1.

100,000 people. That's a city.

This past winter, I overheard someone here at the agency say he didn't worry about the price of oil. If it was cold, he turned on the heat. If it was hot, he turned on the air conditioner.

And that's really great. He makes the kind of money that he can do that. He worked hard to get to that point in life. And baring him doing anything stupid, there's a good chance he'll be ignoring the thermostat until he's dead and buried. Good for him. I guess in this dog-eat-dog world, that pretty much flies.

There's just something unjust about the whole thing, though, when the price of necessities are out of reach. It's one thing when you can't, like me, afford the price of a couple of baseball tickets to see the Red Sox. It's quite another when the price of a gallon of gas is inching toward $4.00 and you need to buy gas to get to work, or it seems one of these days in the not-to-far-distant-future the cost of food will be in the same bracket as gas. Or you can't afford to heat your home in a place like New England.

I don't even know what the price of home heating oil is. I know before I moved to our new apartment where we heat and cook with gas, that I was getting killed with $500 oil bills just about every three months, even in the summer months because it was an old place and the water heater continually heated the water, even if I didn't use it. What a waste that was.