MindSpinner

At the small-town pharmacy and gift shop where I’ve filled my prescriptions for years, four employees stood in the doorway yesterday afternoon, examining the twin glass entry doors. I chuckled and said, “Looks as if you’re having a meeting.” They laughed, too, but ruefully. They were looking at the glass, which looked ordinary enough to me, even clean and new. They kept looking at it as if there were something to see besides glass. Then one of the women, the friendly spouse of a history teacher, explained.

“Someone threw a rock through the door last night. They helped themselves to what they wanted.” They wanted, predictably enough, drugs that could be sold on the street, not the gifts, candles, cards, and trinkets that still lined the shelves. She did not state the magnitude of the losses incurred at the hands of thieves who broke the glass door.

This little pharmacy is usually very busy and cheerful. Pharmacists and cashiers know people by name, and customers, given their number, have to wait for ten minutes or so for prescriptions to be filled. But yesterday pharmacists outnumbered customers, and I heard my name in not more than two or three minutes.

A Walgreens has opened right up the road, and a new Rite Aid just across the street. The coupon for Walgreens came in the mail last week - “Bring a new (ongoing) prescription to Walgreens and save $20.” At the small-town pharmacy, it won’t be the thieves of a single night who steal the store. It will be Walgreens and Rite Aid, which were not needed where they mushroomed, within a quarter mile of each other, and right on the doorstep of a friendly little pharmacy that takes good care of its customers. The undercurrent of grimness I sensed yesterday extended beyond broken glass and stolen pills. To steal pills is a crime. To steal customers is savvy business.

If you want to commit a crime, and do so with a window of impunity, you have to be powerful and commit a really big one in the name of something or other. You’re just doing business, or you are defending national security, or you are waging war.

But not everybody is fooled - just enough folks to ensure that you get by with it for longer than you should.

In five years, the small-town pharmacy may be gone - stolen away little by little. I’m feeling as if my country is being stolen away just as surely, by those who throw big rocks in the name of hollow ideas. I feel the loss of all I longed for it to be.