My printer just ran out of ink! Oh, no, what will I do? How can I get along without a printer? I’ll have to drive into town and buy some more ink. That will be a round trip of almost 30 miles and gas is costing ever closer to $4 a gallon.

Is this world getting crazier by the day?

I watch television news. We don’t have High Definition but it’s really not so bad. We cope, somehow. What I see on the news are stories about how worried everyone is about obesity. We are shown fat, fat kids waddling around, while the fat, fat parents pour them bowls of sugarcoated cereal to which they will add more sugar. They will go off to school where they can buy hamburgers and pizza for lunch, which will be washed down with chocolate milk or sugary soda.

In the next scene on our plain old HD-less tube we see famine. People are starving to death. Babies with swollen bellies and glassy eyes are too weak to cry. We see people with all their belongings in the world strapped to their heads, staggering under the weight of the children they carry in their arms. And they are being shot at.

But I’m out of ink for my printer.

There are reports of shortages of wheat and rice so serious that someone suggested recently that we might bring back rationing. Many remember the sacrifices we were asked to make during World War II. In the spring of 1942 the U.S. government started a program in which families were given stamps for food, gas, clothing, tires. Each household member was allotted rations. My family was on the large size and newborns were a bonus because they were worth the same in coupons as the adults. We didn’t have a car because my mother didn’t drive and my father was in the military, so there was no need for gas and tire coupons. If we brought our grandmother some sugar coupons when we visited, she would make us a cake.

We did little complaining; that’s the way it was.

I don’t remember there being a lot of obese people. Walking to school, back home for lunch, back to school, back home again, kept off those unsightly pounds. And even though most of us belonged to the clean-plate-club, the amount served on that plate was reasonable because we were taught that wasting food was immoral when there were people starving in the world.

It’s hard not to eat too much. Food is so darn good and we get fresh vegetables all year round. Remember canned green beans? They were gross.

How strange it is that starvation is rampant in Africa and people in this country spend millions on programs that tell them just to eat less food and get a little exercise.

We’ve come to a very strange place in the road. We have too much of everything and people are dieing because that can’t get a little of what we don’t want.

And I’m out of ink for my printer.