Letter to the Editor: What goes up must come down

Eggs and gasoline. Remember all the hand-wringing and doomsday talk when prices for eggs and gas shot up faster than a SpaceX rocket? The two commodities that everyone was all panicked about just a year ago are now slowly but surely dropping in price. Not all that long ago we were paying $5 or more for a dozen eggs and well over $4 a gallon for unleaded gas. Now eggs are back to around $2 to $3 and the price of gas is inching closer to below the $3 mark.

Wholesale prices for Midwest eggs in the shells are now just under $1 a dozen when last year the price was more than $5 wholesale. The cycle swings around.

Grocery stores know customers don’t like wild price swings so the shelf prices are coming down a bit slower, but they are coming down. Gas is selling for under $3 in some places. I suppose it won’t be long before we are back to complaining that $3 a gallon is too high.

What goes up must come down. And after the smoke clears and the prices eventually come back down we can all relax and reflect on our overreactions.

One citizen even petitioned the city to change a city ordinance so they could raise chickens in their yard because eggs were so expensive. Fortunately, calmer heads prevailed and that idea went nowhere. But that’s just an example of how we seem to live and react only to the moment without taking a minute to think things through before acting.

The next time so-called “experts” in the media and online start working the public’s fears of the unknown and abrupt changes in their routines to push some agenda, take a deep breath and realize that these glitches in the matrix are usually temporary and most the damage done is due to our poor reactions to these challenges when we should instead be using our abilities to think and adapt and make changes to lessen the impact these price swings have on our lives.

We need to be prepared for adversity without becoming unglued, and we need to be willing to make the changes necessary to get over these bumps in the road. And for goodness sake, just relax.

John Moore

Newton