For the past two years, trying to maintain good reports and hear the words from my cardiologist, “See you in six months,” I’ve been trying to get back to an exercise routine, so when the weather is right, I’ve been taking walks around 5:00 am two/three times a week, from our house on Stowe St. to the Third St. Bridge and back. On the route I’ve set up, and walk most times (with an occasional change now and then), the walk’s about 3.2 miles and it takes me about an hour to complete. I have a treadmill, but prefer walking outdoors. It gives me a feeling of starting somewhere and actually traveling a distance to a place, then returning to the place I started. Walking the treadmill gives me the feeling of spinning my wheels during my walk, because I don’t really go anywhere.

As I walk through downtown, I recall what used to be where including clothing, shoe, and jewelry, five and dime stores, banks, bakeries/coffee shops, drug stores, restaurants, and where a few Full Service Gas Stations were situated in downtown Jamestown.

As I think of those gas stations and their locations, I try remembering the much less cost of gas we paid back then (I started driving in 1969), and the periodic “gas wars” especially on East 2nd St, sometimes as low as .16/gallon every now and then. We did go through a short time, though, when we could only purchase gas based on our license plate number and the date. Plates ending odd, could only be purchased on odd days of the month and vice versa.

My thoughts sometime bring me to the comparison of costs between then and now, I think of the feelings of many, that gas prices may be the product of the person who’s employed in the Oval Office today.

It seems that some feel that a president sets the price of gas. It especially comes out loud and clear when there’s a change in political affiliation of the person in the Oval Office. Then the fingers start pointing in full force.

In 1964, a released song, sung by Shirley Ellis, titled, The Name Game” made a splash and was a favorite with which to sing-a-long with the 45 vinyl disk spun on our record players, the clock radios in our bedrooms, car radios when Dad might let us listen to our stations on the car radio, or through the one earphone that came with our transistor radios which provided the music of our generation.

In thinking of who’s responsible for rising prices, I think we could use the melody of Ellis’s hit song but rewrite the lyrics and then call it, The Blame Game.”

We live in a different time than when we were kids, even young adults. Whenever prices rise, we feel the need to blame someone for that. Food prices have gone up. Prices of new houses have increased immensely. Car prices have skyrocketed to where some new vehicles nearly, or has exceeded, double what Sally and I paid for our house in 1984. If you watch the Game Show Network, and see when someone won a car back in the 1970s, the average cost of a new automobile was around $3542.00 when gas averaged about .36 a gallon. Average salaries, and hourly wages (minimum wage in the 70s was around $1.25 an hour) were much less then too, as were the costs of homes, food, clothes, entertainment, and everything else back then. The ratio of salary and job wages compared to the cost of living then, compared to today, might not be as proportionally wide as we might think it is today.

There are many reasons for the rise in cost of living in the past 50 years. It’s a domino effect. Costs of manufacturing goods has risen, it costs more to grow and raise food, the demand for goods and entertainment have risen considerably. The advancements in technology, a.k.a. the computer age, has created new ways to teach students, our demand for computers, smart phones and watches, medical equipment used today, the desire for larger screen televisions, drones, new ways of cooking have created much of the rising cost of living. The list goes on and on. We want these items, and in many cases we need them to survive in the world today. Look at all the ways we can only use our mobile devices to go to a concert, a ballgame, a movie, as opposed to the paper tickets we used to be able to use, and that list goes on and on too.

If blame is to be placed somewhere, it can’t be just placed on one person. It’s the result of many things. It’s supply and demand, the cost of manufacturing, of growing/raising food, of cost of living increases in salaries/wages that have brought us to where we are today. If blame is to be placed, it should be placed on all of us, be it by necessity or desire. It’s not the fault of any one person no matter to which political party they belong.

An adage I used in school often was, “If you point a finger (blame) at someone else, three fingers still point to you.” Food for thought?