what once were services now are luxuries

well...winter's here, and no mistake...it's been snowing here for the past twenty-four hours or better...nothing major like the plains blizzards i've been reading about....just a steady, light snowfall...a couple of inches so far...nothing new for these parts and nothing we can't handle...standard stuff...you just need to be a bit more cautious driving because of the few idiots out ther that snow seems to both embolden and stupify...but what i have noticed is that the roads seem to be in really poor shape in relation to the ammount of snow...the communities i've been in this morning ( lake station, portage, and hobart) all seem equallly bad...i don't ever expect my street will be anything but a skating rink in winter...fair enough...it's a residential street and people shouldn't go tearing through here anyway...but i was having some sliding difficulties on the main roads as well...snowy...icy..rutted...and not alot of plows to be seen...true it's still snowing, but cities usually make some sort of an effort to take care of intersections...then i saw something on my way home from my mom's that illuminated the issue to some extent...i saw a plow on old ridge road in hobart filled to the brim with sand instead of salt and the impact of an eroded tax base because of the jobless recovery recession that will end sometime in the middle of the next decade became obvious...i lived in hobart from 1959 to 1975 and again from 1980 to 1985...and all i ever saw on the streets in winter was salt...not this year apparently....when a city as arrogant and vain as hobart starts to sand the winter streets you know the shit has hit the fan economically...hobart may be a city of busybodies and crybabies, but they do like to feed their pretenses...and sand doesn't get it...doesn't do too much for the roads either really...just make the snow dingy earlier than normal...this is the first real municipal manifestation of the economic slump that's actually hit home to me...you have to wonder what services will become cut corners in the near future.