My brother always says, "You can either make lemon aid or you can suck on the lemon."
These days, we're lucky if we have the lemon....
In and around my neighborhood, restaurants and businesses are falling prey to the economic realities of the world. It is shocking and depressing. Scary. In the last few months, one corner has seen Starbucks close (okay, I admit, I wasn't one hundred percent sad when it did), and upstairs, gone too is a Berkeley stalwart restaurant that everyone had been to at least once, and just yesterday, at that same intersection, Elephant Pharmacy closed its doors....
Elephant's website has this message: "It is with a heavy heart that we post this notice: Elephant Pharm has closed indefinitely. As a small business, we’ve been hurt by the terrible turn the economy has taken and the tightening of the credit market. It’s been a very special six years since we started this drugstore revolution, and we certainly couldn’t have made it as far as we did without you—our customers. We hope that you will continue your pursuit of a good, long life, well lived."
If that isn't a tear-jerker, I don't know what is....Last night when my daughter heard the news, (big news in our house, as I've been a booster of this store since it opened, with its alternative healing and its commitment to the local community), she said, with a stricken look, "Let's move to Canada." Not much better, we had to tell her. "Mexico, then," she said. "There too," we said. It's a slippery slope all over the world....
How then, lemon aid or lemon bars instead of puckering on a sour lemon? I don't have any good answers; I don't know how we get a foothold and don't succumb to the slippery slope...but I do know that answers or not, we can't give up....Giving up is not an option.
No comments:
Post a Comment