The Late Great U S of A

 When I first started out of Columbus, Oh. C/F had a terminal there and sent several sets of doubles like that this to their St. Louis terminal everyday. It was an 8 hour drive each way so the driver would layover at each end for their 8 hour break as they didn't have a bunk to take that break in.

At this time there wasn't many conventional tractors east of the Mississippi so most everybody drove cabovers or "COE", cab over engine. Eventually owner operators started buying the bigger "Large Cars" so that now even the fleets use them and you hardly ever see a cabover.

                                                            

That just reminded me when I saw the pictures on the news the other night of the big pileup on I-80 in the snow. Going from Columbus to St. Louis and return on 40 and I-70 used to be treacherous in the winter and a lot of times those doubles would be loaded light so that the wind blowing out of the north, when you were running east and west, would blow you right off the road.

Many times their would be C/F, Roadway or Yellow trucks parked in the median all over the place.

Thank GOD that's over !   Keep on trucking, Dutch  

The Late Great U S of A

This post will be a little different .  

It has elements of trucking and things I have experienced in my career but it addresses something that I see wrong with my beloved country.

Back when I started driving being a truck driver was nothing more than a dock worker that drove a truck to work. You manually loaded and unloaded your trailer some times several times a day and then got to drive to a different destination and do it all over again.

You really had to want to be a truck driver and you had to have help to get a good paying job in that industry. Therefor most of the drivers where born and breed American males who spoke English and lived  in cities, towns, and farm communities with shared likes and dislikes with others in that area.

With few exceptions, when you stopped at a T/S for fuel or food you usually had no problem at all communicating with the help and other drivers and finding decent facilities as everyone respected the other people they had to interact with, it was just understood.

That slowly changed as the truck builders improved the ease of driving of the rigs and the demand for drivers approached the critical point. Then the "driving instruction schools" started popping up and the Government started to take able bodied men from the unemployment roles and taught them how to be productive and tax paying drivers.

These people came from all walks of life and some had no desire at all to be truck driver but they couldn't draw unemployment any longer so they became the "NEW BREED" of truck driver and some realized that they had more money than ever before even though they didn't like the job.

This opened up a new opportunity for people from different countries to find employment here in the U. S. and several got licenses under questionable circumstances with little to no experience driving trucks on the highways of this country or having any idea of the common sense protocols that had been taught from men who started the trucking industry to begin with.

It didn't take long for these short cummings to appear as first with our neighbors to the south and the equipment that they drove into the states and couldn't pass safety inspections and some of them had trouble managing winter weather in the mountain states. This soon started showing up with Middle Eastern drivers as there was a large population in California that started to haul produce to the east coast which is also hard driving in the winter.

This brings me to the crux of this post.  The Mexican drivers new there place and that they would have to prove they could operate safely among the rest of us on the highways to gain our respect and that would take time but as more and more young driving school graduates entered the ranks we started getting more and more drivers that had no concern for their fellow drivers, that coupled with an increase of Middle Eastern trucks on the road with drivers that seemed like they didn't want anything to do with the rest of us as witnessed by some things that happened in the rest rooms and parking lots most of us truckers have all encountered, makes me worried that the America I've known and loved is slipping away.

And a final point I would like to add, we have before us a serious situation in 2020.  It appears that the elections have now changed from differences between two parties to the difference of the old style of common sense Republican conservatism and Socialism and I for one don't want Socialism !

I look at what we have in the President now. A person who works hard every day to make changes to better our country for it's people, minorities included, improving our standing in the world and our future. Even though their are those who would have you believe he has and is doing something sinister, but as I see it, isn't doing anything that most all politicians have done, do and will continue to do no matter what side of the isle they're on.

Then we have the Democrats, [read Socialists] that have an X Vice-President who had shady dealings over seas, a Hispanic, a Muslim, a admitted Socialist, a Gay and a want-a-be Indian squaw just to highlight a few. It looks like the Democrats have the minorities covered pretty well.

 I myself am going to vote Republican and hope we can hold on to the country I love and help Mr. Trump to continue to make America Great for us all. [Democrats included]