Sometimes, shopping at Walmart can tell you far more about how life is changing in the United States than all the polls and surveys. Why do I use Walmart? Because the prices on staples are far lower than the other three markets in Cedar City, and since Cedar City is on I-15 – the most direct route to California – the produce is not only better, but far less expensive.

Because my wife the professor works long hours on a regular basis, and I can shop when it’s not crowded, I do almost all the grocery shopping, usually once or twice a week. On my last trip, I had two items on my list that I only need to replenish once or twice a year, if that – black boot/shoe polish and black edge-dressing or scuffcoat.

Except this time, Walmart had neither. And it wasn’t that they were out of stock. That whole small shoe section had been reduced to one shelf, with neutral polish and other items having nothing to do with polish, surrounded by insoles for all sizes of feet.

Perhaps it’s my upbringing, or possibly the years in the Navy, but I’ve always liked my boots to be polished. And I wear boots because almost any kind of shoes, even expensive designer shoes or high-end athletic shoes, get painful within hours, if not a few minutes. Except for my work boots, scuffed and dirty boots or shoes, to me at least, suggest a certain slovenliness or lack of character. It’s not that I particularly enjoy polishing boots, but that I dislike appearing unkempt or sloppy (except when engaged in manual labor, where I can quickly get unkempt).

As I was pondering the lack of shoe polish, I realized another fact – that the local cobbler had closed his shop a month previous, and there was no one repairing or resoling shoes or boots in Cedar City any longer. I’ve had some of my boots more than ten years, and I’m hard on them. So I’ve needed new soles and heels on a continuing basis, but getting them repaired is obviously coming to an end.

So, I suspect, are the days of polished leather boots and shoes, replaced by the ubiquitous sneakers or extraordinarily expensive athletic shoes that wear out quickly, none of which are designed to fit my clearly Neanderthal feet.

And it’s not just me. For years, my wife has bemoaned the fact that it’s almost impossible for her to find shoes that fit, ever since shoe manufacturers simplified their sizing. If a woman has a moderate forefoot and a narrow heel, she’ll end up slipping out of a standard shoe (although some manufacturers supply pads), and any shoe narrow enough to fit her heel will be too tight to accommodate her forefoot.

Yes, the times are definitely changing, from head to foot, especially for feet.

Almost every year in late spring, just about this time, I write about my lilacs and their never-ending battle against the vagaries of the climate here in Cedar City. My lilac bushes are deep purple, and I love their scent – provided I have the chance to enjoy it.

We’ve had a comparatively warm winter, often with rain instead of snow, and by the first of April the daily highs were in the mid-sixties, and it was no longer freezing at night. By the twentieth of April, daily the temperature was flirting with all-time highs. Last Wednesday, the temperature neared eighty, and the lilacs decided that it was time to leaf out and bloom. By Friday night I could smell just a trace of their scent.

By Saturday morning, however, the wind picked up, ranging from twenty to thirty miles per hour, blowing away any scent that the lilacs emitted. Sunday morning, the wind was even fiercer, with cold gusts well over forty miles per hour. Then, around three o’clock we got small hail that turned into sleet, which after fifteen minutes turned into heavy snow. The temperature dropped to thirty-seven degrees and by six o’clock we had some four inches of snow.

For the lilacs, it didn’t get any better, because by ten o’clock the temperature dropped to below freezing and stayed there until sunrise. By then the temperature rose above freezing, although the lilac bushes –and blossoms — were still festooned with snow. By midday, it was clear and sunny, with a temperature of 48 F, and there was no trace of snow on the lilacs, and the blossoms weren’t frost-bitten.

Unfortunately, the combination of wind, snow, and cold destroyed any chance of enjoying the rare chance smelling lilacs in bloom… again.

We all tend to hold memories in which we firmly believe… but sometimes those firm memories aren’t as accurate as we think they are.

For years, I “remembered” when the Denver Broncos opened the season by winning eight straight games, and then lost eight straight and never made the playoffs. But when I checked the actual records, I discovered that no such season ever existed. The closest season to that was in 1962, when the Broncos won six of their first seven games, then lost six of the final seven games. While that was close to what I remembered, obviously my brain wanted to emphasize the magnitude of the Broncos’ collapse, for whatever reason, possibly because of how bad the Broncos were in the early years.

Now, some people have better memories than others. A relative of my wife was a singer and a conductor. More than forty years ago, he conducted university choirs at a program where the late Grace Kelly, the former actress and then the Princess of Monaco, gave a poetry reading. He honestly didn’t remember that, and his former wife had to dig out newspaper clippings to prove he had conducted Kelly’s program there and had even been at the reception. I think it’s fair to say that a former professional musician who cannot recall being on a program with Grace Kelly has definite memory difficulties.

On the other hand, I’ve learned that, if my wife recalls something – that was the way it was, because what she recalls is always accurate, particularly with regard to people and events. She does not remember telephone numbers well, which, as I mentioned some time ago, created difficulties with a financial institution, who insisted she had to remember the telephone number of the house where she lived some forty years ago (back before the era of cell phones).

Despite my mis-recollection about the 1962 Broncos’ season, I’m generally more accurate with numbers and facts, but obviously not as accurate as I’d like to believe, and I suspect that’s true of most of us.

Because I’m originally from Denver, and because my grandfather bought season tickets back when the Broncos were terrible and tickets were actually affordable, he took me to a few games when I was a teenager. As result, I do follow the Broncos, if neither religiously nor obsessively.

I was mildly surprised to see a headline that the Broncos had drafted Bo Nix – the Oregon quarterback who’s gotten a lot of attention over the past few years. I was then even more surprised to learn that, despite the fact that the Broncos desperately need a first-rate quarterback, and not a retread from elsewhere (despite their short success with Peyton Manning), and the fact that Nix was about the top of those available when the Broncos picked, all the football “pundits” decided that the Broncos had made one of the worse choices possible.

I read a bit further and discovered those same pundits had trashed the choices of a few other teams as well, all of which irritated me. Choosing which college players will make it in the NFL is anything but a sure thing, and the pundits are often wrong. Sometimes, players no one ever heard of make it big time. Brock Purdy, the current SF 49ers quarterback, was “Mr. Irrelevant,” the very last player drafted in 2022. Back in 2000, the New England Patriots took the 199th pick in the draft to choose a fellow named Brady.

On the other hand, who remembers JaMarcus Russell, Terry Baker, Tim Couch, Ryan Leaf, or quite a few other high draft picks who never lived up to their college performance and hype?

It’s one thing to judge a professional football player on his NFL statistics and career, or a coach on his won-lost record, but it’s another to second-guess a football team’s picks well before the fact. One of the reasons I don’t like such second-guessing is that almost no one holds the second-guessers to account. By the next draft, everyone’s forgotten inaccurate second-guessing, but the negative impacts to coaches and teams tend to linger.

But then, I’ve never been fond of negative second-guessers in any field, particularly in politics, where all too many of the inaccurate second-guessers don’t have that much in-depth experience, and in writing, where too many second-guesses reflect more what critics and reviewers like as opposed how well the author accomplished what he or she set out to do.

In the April 22nd and 29th issue of The New Yorker, in “How Gullible Are You?”, Manvir Singh writes about “misinformation and the nature of belief.” It’s a decent article, in which Singh discusses misinformation, some of its recent history, and discusses French philosopher and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber’s distinction between “factual beliefs” (i.e., chairs are real) and symbolic beliefs (God is real) as well as the efforts of various theorists who offer ways to combat misinformation.

Singh points out that virtually all efforts to fight false fabrications and misinformation rest on the assumption of human gullibility while ignoring “the far larger forces that drive the phenomenon,” particularly the lack of trust in government and other social institutions. And essentially, that’s where the article ends.

What he doesn’t really or fully address is why misinformation and, for example, Donald Trump’s insistence that major media peddle “fake news” have gained such a hold on so many people.

The answer, as I considered the matter, is actually simple, and, in a way, profound. Much of what the media and the Democrats are pushing is in fact “fake news” to the people who endorse the Trumpist and MAGA rhetoric.

Declining unemployment is “fake news” to people who don’t have jobs and who live in situations where they cannot get decent paying jobs. In more than a few parts of Appalachia, jobs requiring college degrees or even graduate degrees pay less than what coal truck drivers used to make. In fact, one of my wife’s cousins made more driving a coal truck than she did as a tenured college professor. But most of those coal jobs vanished with the closure of the mines, and the inadequate “reclamation” and the massive rains of two years ago have destroyed thousands of homes, with no repairs or replacements. Tell all those people that times are better, and they’ll likely think you’re purveying fake news.

Tell all the young people who’ve mortgaged their future to get higher education and graduate degrees and who can’t find jobs paying enough to service their debt that times are improving, especially when we’re producing more college graduates than we have higher paying jobs for.

Inflation rates are down, but food prices and housing costs are not, and telling people that inflation is down doesn’t agree with what they are paying for groceries and lodging, and that equates to “fake news” in many people’s minds.

The only thing that will change the views of most of these people is real improvement in their lives, and that’s unlikely to occur any time soon, given the multiplicity of factors compounding the problem, ranging from high housing and transportation/relocation costs, the mismatch between skills and/or lack of skills and existing job requirements, to the unwillingness and/or inability of unemployed or underemployed people to relocate.

All that means that “fake news” will remain “fake news” for the foreseeable future.