Walgreens has 9,000 locations in the United States, and, this week, in something like 200 of them, pharmacists are walking off the job, citing stress, understaffing, changing schedules at the last moment, and inadequate training for pharmacy staff.

This couldn’t come at a worse moment for Walgreens, whose stock value has roughly dropped fifty percent over the last year, and whose earnings aren’t improving significantly., and whose CEO departed recently. The company blames some of the problem on the fallout from fewer Covid vaccinations and says that the walkouts are limited to a few stores.

But, from what little I’ve seen, the problems are far worse than the company admits, and affect more than just a few locations.

We have a single Walgreens here in Cedar City, and it’s also where my wife and I get vaccinations, as a great many people do, because there aren’t that many options in Cedar City. It’s also not one of the stores cited as having walkouts.

Two years ago, I could call the store and get an appointment for a vaccination. Last year, Walgreens implemented a mandatory national vaccination schedule. Even if the pharmacy was empty, you had to go online to get an appointment.

This year I scheduled an appointment for Covid and flu vaccines. When I arrived, I was told that the Covid vaccine hadn’t arrived and that the store hadn’t been told the vaccine would be delayed in enough time to contact people – if, indeed, they’d had enough staff to do so, which they didn’t. Now… the staff was pleasant, and apologetic. And I got the flu vaccine quickly, with little fuss … and waited to reschedule the Covid shot. I also noted that the pharmacy staff never stopped moving, except to wait on people or answer the telephone.

When my wife went to get her vaccination, after the Covid vaccine arrived, despite the advance registration, the waiting time was forty-five minutes because the pharmacy didn’t have enough staff.

I’ve thought back, and over the past three years, that Walgreens appears to have changed almost all the pharmacy staff at least three times. I’ve had a different pharmacist or pharmacy tech give me a shot each time, and yet there are never more than five or six people working in the pharmacy.

So… I’m inclined to believe the pharmacists who attribute the problem to management, and I also suspect that management needs to pay more attention to operations than to the stock price.

Americans are dissatisfied, in a wide range of areas, but particularly in their current political choices, and I’m afraid that the dissatisfaction is only going to get worse because, as a nation, we refuse to face certain realities.

The first unpleasant reality is that no society, even the U.S., can offer the higher standard of living which most Americans want to all its population (unless the society is small and relatively homogenous). In the U.S., there aren’t enough resources and energy sources to do that (not to mention the “small” problem that using that much energy would increase global warming). The second is that we’re producing twice as many college graduates for high-paying “elite” jobs than there are jobs, which means that more than half of those degree holders are unlikely to ever be able to pay back the debt they’ve incurred in pursuit of those degrees, and each year those numbers increase, and so does dissatisfaction.

Then there’s the fact that tens of millions of people outside the U.S. are more than willing to come here, because almost any form of subsistence in the U.S. is better than what they face where they are, and there’s at least some hope by coming here.

Add to that the fact that the majority of Americans are looking for a one-size-fits-all perfect solution. No system, plan, or method works perfectly all the time, and the greater the diversity of those relaying on a system and the greater the range of problems the system has to deal with, the lower the probability of agreement among the users of the system. For large systems to work, political or economic, compromise is necessary, like it or not.

On top of that, a significant percentage of Americans don’t want to compromise. Those with great wealth are piling up more wealth, and those with few or no financial resources feel their comparative situation is worsening. The wealthy have the political power and resources to avoid compromising, and the poor have comparatively less and less.

All of these facts and factors are well-known. They’re everywhere. So what are our politicians doing to address them?

In recent political debates, especially among Republicans, I’ve observed that, for the most part, the politicians who assess the current situation more realistically and also advocate at least semi-realistic changes appear to be the least popular. I see the same problem among the Democrats.

Could it be that everyone fears that any actual realistic solution will hurt them or go against what they believe? And that any politician who’s realistic faces getting thrown out of office?

It’s certainly possible, since the U.S. continues to spend far more than its revenues and the politicians appear unable to cut spending (because too many people will suffer) and unable to raise taxes on the wealthy (despite the greatest income disparity in U.S. history)… and yet they’re unwilling to work out a realistic compromise, because it’s clear that too many voters find compromise unacceptable… and are demanding the unworkable and unobtainable perfect solution.

I’d venture to say that the vast majority of Americans have encountered something written by Charles Dickens, even if it’s only one of the movie versions of A Christmas Carol, or perhaps high school English class required reading of A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, or David Copperfield.

One of the aspects of Dickens that has always bothered me about his work is the lack of loose ends. As one New York Times book reviewer wrote years ago, “Dickens seduced his readers with atmosphere and then clubbed them with coincidence. He dreaded loose ends – no one has ever tied up his literary anxieties with more circumstantial knots.”

While Dickens has been criticized for “paper” main characters, excessive sentiment, and a reliance on fortuitous circumstances, what bothered me more was the lack of loose ends. Even as a student in high school, it always seemed to me that life was filled with meaningless death and loose ends.

Over the years, I’ve seen that novelists certainly recognize and often overdo meaningless deaths, if sometimes imbuing deaths with more meaning than they actually have, but some seem to work too hard to tie up all the loose ends, even if that seldom happens in real life, which is far less tidy than fiction.

But today, as in Dickens’s time, a great many readers enjoy having all the loose ends tied up and feel that the only loose ends that shouldn’t be tied up are those that will indeed be tied up in the sequel. This is natural, given that life is indeed untidy, and one of the reasons people read novels is not only to be entertained, but also to be challenged, as well as given a sense of meaning or order in life.

As a result of my feelings about loose ends, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I leave more than a few loose ends in any novel, some of which will never be resolved, and that just might be because I have the feeling that, more often than not, the only order and meaning in life come from what individuals and their societies create, and that no one is capable of tying up all the loose ends in life.

But that also might explain, at least partly, why I don’t have a best-seller like Tale of Two Cities, which, tied-up loose ends and all, has sold more than 200 million copies and is still selling, more than a century and a half after the author’s death.

Right now, it appears as though the main objective of the right-wing Republicans in the U.S. House isn’t to improve government, or to adopt a sensible federal budget, or even to keep the government going, but to attack and try to impeach President Joe Biden because he beat Donald Trump in the last election.

To me, it also seems as though the Republicans in the House have forgotten that they live in a representative democracy where they need to consider the views of all the people, not just those in their districts who elected them. Right now, the far-right wing in the House has little or no interest in working policy matters out, despite some of their rhetoric. Even the rhetoric is totally unrealistic – just how are they going to pass eleven appropriations bills in a few days, when in nine months the Republican leadership has only been able to get one relatively non-controversial appropriations bill passed by the House?

The Republican right is far more interested in imposing their views on everyone else, just like Trump (not to mention Tommy Tuberville) wants to do, regardless of the Constitution and long-standing political processes and practices.

It apparently doesn’t matter to those of the far right that the overwhelming majority of Americans want some form of legal abortion close to what Roe v. Wade provided. It doesn’t matter that the majority of Americans doesn’t want government shutdowns, or massive cuts in Medicare or Medicaid, or the freezing of military promotions. And, of course, the far-right wants also wants to stop all investigations and prosecutions of those involved in the January 6th insurrection and attempts to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. They also want to close the U.S. southern border, but have no workable plan (and will never be able to implement one without turning the U.S. into a total autocracy, as I’ve discussed earlier).

And, ironically, despite all their efforts to run over everyone else’s rights, they persist in calling themselves the “Freedom Caucus.”

A recent ABC news poll finds Trump almost ten points ahead of President Biden in a head-to-head match-up.

How is it that a man convicted of sexual abuse and sequential tax evasion, who’s also facing four more criminal indictments and 91 felony counts, is outpolling the President who’s accomplished more legislatively in two years than any other President in at least a decade, if not longer, and, messy as it was, finally extracted the United States from a seemingly endless war in Afghanistan?

How is it that Biden gets blamed for the inflation that was started by overspending in the Trump administration? How is it that the most pro-labor President in decades is losing labor votes to a billionaire whose every action in the private sector prior to becoming president effectively minimized or screwed labor and their employers?

How is it that people worry so much more about Biden’s age than Trump’s, especially since there’s not that much difference in age between the two, and since Trump is a convicted criminal and a serial liar who takes enormous liberties with the facts, a behavior far more indicative of senility than Biden’s occasional speech gaffes (which he’s had most of his life, possibly the result of a childhood problem with stuttering)?

In addition, the poll shows that more people blame Biden than Trump for Congress’s failure to act to stop a government shutdown, when the shutdown is being caused by the right wing of the Republican party, and when the Republicans control the House, and so far have only been able to pass one minor appropriations bill.

The only answer that makes sense is anger at rising prices and government’s failure to deal with issues – most of which failure lies with Congress, not with Biden.

But right now, it appears the majority of Americans are so blinded with anger that they honestly can’t see or think straight… and that’s a real problem.