My Local Pizza Place On The Big Bailout

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Tonight was an eye-opening experience. Running behind all day long, Hubby and I decided to order a meat-lover’s stromboli for two, and I drove down the road to our local pizza place to pick it up.

There are some things you don’t do in life. You don’t start whistling in the check out line at the grocery store. You don’t give out your personal banking information to the Prince of Nigeria, regardless of how desperate that email sounds.

And, you don’t talk politics at the local pizza place.

All that changed tonight.

I knew something was up the second I walked in the door. The small, cramped waiting area is dominated by a pickup counter on one end, and a pretty nice plasma screen TV on the other. Now, usually the owner, a young father of Greek descent, has Fox News running in the background while waitresses and busboys and delivery folks are scrambling to keep up with the dinner rush, and he helps out between the kitchen and answering the phone and ringing up customers.

Tonight, he was front and center, watching the news. And he wasn’t watching Fox, he was watching NBC Nightly News, national and local.

And boy was he pissed.

The local news from New York mentioned deep cuts in the city’s budget, and a packed job fair with folks waiting for blocks in line to try to get some face time with everyone from AFLAC to Party City. The commentator mentioned that this was “the worst economy in years.”

His face reddened.

“We should have never gotten involved in this. It should have never gotten this bad.” He said, turning up the volume.

“We should have never gotten involved in a lot of stuff – look at the Iraq war.” I replied. He nodded his head, silently, listening to the news paint an ever more dire picture of the economy.

One of the waiters emerged from the kitchen and the owner gestured to him. “What did I tell ya?” He said. “See, I can fix this mess. They want to get us outta recession? You give each of us a million dollars like you’re gonna give all those guys on Wall Street and we’ll clean this up. We’ll bail out Detroit. Chrysler won’t have nothin’ to worry about.”

The waiter smiled and nodded.

“Hey, all I need is the $10,000 this thing is supposed to cost each of us and I’ll be good.” I said. “All I wanna do is fix my porch.”

The waiter laughed while the owner shook his finger at me, jokingly, “Come on, sister. Stay with the program. You, me, him, all of us a million dollars each, and I swear there won’t be no more economic problems.”

“Well, I don’t want to be greedy – ” I responded, but the owner cut me off.

“We ain’t greedy. Those guys,” he gestured to the television, “those guys are the greedy ones. They’ll be bailed out and they’ll leave the rest of us holding the bag.”

“Well,” I said, “I just hope folks wise up in November and vote the idiots out who got us all into this mess in the first place.” You’d think I had just hit three home runs and done cartwheels sliding into third plate. The place erupted. The owner, the waiter, the cooks in the kitchen who had been listening to this but hadn’t moved from their ovens, everyone burst out in sudden applause.

This happened tonight. About 7:00 pm eastern. And I’m sharing this story to let folks know it’s ugly out there. It’s not just all of us in our blogging bubble that are upset about this rip-off of a bailout.

When the local pizza place guy starts talking politics, when he breaks that unspoken rule, you know something serious is going down.

And whichever party is serious about winning this election should understand that. It isn’t about “Washington greed”. It isn’t about “special interests”. And it certainly isn’t about lipstick or pigs or the media foodfight between the McCain campaign and the press.

For folks like my pizza place guy, it’s about a bunch of Wall Street executives getting his money – money that he could use to put back into his business or help his family – after screwing everything up.

And whoever can connect with that man, I am positive, will win this election.