A new Mom’s Organic Market just opened about a half mile from our house. It is directly across Connecticut Avenue from a large Giant (no pun intended, was there?) Food Store, and within a block of a large Saturday farmer’s market. If you head down Connecticut Avenue another half mile, you will find a Streets Market and a Yes! Organic Market. If you head the other direction on Connecticut from our house, within a mile you will find a Safeway and a Magruders. If you go west, towards Wisconsin Avenue, you will find a Whole Foods and a Wegman’s within a mile of us, and if you extend your reach to 1.5 miles, you will find another Whole Foods and an Amazon Fresh. And, oh yes, a Trader Joe’s scheduled to open in that neighborhood soon. I probably forgot one or two major food stores (for example, I forgot the neighborhood Broad Branch Market, which my GPS tells me is .9 miles away, in the residential DC Chevy Chase neighborhood).

That makes 11 grocery stores, plus there are actually four weekly farmers markets in the crop harvesting months, within 1.5 miles of my house. Now, the neighborhoods that these stores service are, as you would expect, on the more prosperous side. It’s Chevy Chase, Forest Hills, American U Park, Friendship Heights, Van Ness and so forth, straddling the DC/Montgomery County line. If you go another 2 miles out Wisconsin Avenue, for example, and get to downtown Bethesda, a similar array of grocery choices will be happy to serve you. That is another wealthy area.

But now let’s go across town to Ward 8. DC is divided into 8 wards. We live in Ward 3. Ward 8, mainly African American, lies to the east of the Anacostia River, a part of town you may never find yourself in if you are a tourist (or even a resident of NW Washington). It is not a bad area, it has some nice neighborhoods, a fair amount of new construction, some history, and a lot of people. Ward 8 and Ward 3 each have about 85,000 residents, as all DC wards have relatively equivalent populations (DC has a population just in excess of 700,000).

Of the 12 grocery stores that are within 1.5 miles of our house, 10 are in the District and two are just over the line into Maryland. And I didn’t list all of the groceries in Ward 3, just those that close to our house. But what if I told you that in all of Ward 8, there was just one major chain grocery store, a Giant on Alabama Avenue? That, other than that, there were only individually owned corner stores, with limited supplies and often higher prices, or that Ward 8 residents had to drive into other parts of the city, or out into Prince George’s County MD to do their shopping?

Clearly, there is something wrong with this picture.

I don’t have a ready made answer, but this is the kind of problem that gets ignored as we look at the larger problems that beset us and that get even larger day by day. Just a thought that we shouldn’t forget the more localized problems, as well.

As to the bigger problem, let me just make one point today. Just because voters seem to be getting more and more worried about and fed up with Trump and the Republicans, that does not mean that they are feeling any warmer towards the Democrats. And current Democratic leadership isn’t doing much to change those perceptions. We had dinner with 8 friends last night, and there was general agreement that the Democrats needed new leaders to step forward who were able to speak not only for themselves but for the party, and who were able to galvanize voters the way Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were able to. In other words, the message does you no good if you don’t have the messenger. Neither Hakim Jeffries nor Chuck Schumer are good messenger. Bernie Sanders and AOC are good messengers, but don’t speak for the party.

Time is awasting.

P.S. I just realized I left out a second Giant and a Lidl on Wisc Ave, within 1.3 miles of our house. That makes 14, not 12.