Life on the Road – Trucking News Blog

Dan Rather did another piece on trucking. It was on HDNet. You can see it by downloading it onto iTunes. OOIDA did a fluff review on the program and seemed delighted the profiled driver wore his OOIDA jacket. Simpletons. The mouthpiece of OOIDA, Todd Spencer, who spends more time “testifying” and writing letters than actually forcing change, is quoted in the piece. And guess what all this latest tick in time accomplishes for drivers pay in this slave trade we call trucking – nothing, zero, zilch.

First of all, Dan Rather is done, finished and has ceased to have a voice in journalism. Nobody has ever heard of NDNet, nobody cares about it and I personally don’t have the to time to figure out how to download his “I need to try and be relevant in my retirement years” hour piece onto my Droid Eris. For an icon like Dan Rather, who had at one point in his career had millions of viewers on the CBS Nightly News, to hope to get 25 comments from truckers who actually did access HDNet, is sad. His impact on our business will be nothing, zero, zilch. The late great Walter Cronkite at least made the choice to sail his yacht in retirement realizing that a new generation of sensationalistic news clowns like Glen Beck and Sean Hannity now command the attention of the American public. We all know journalism is dead. Oprah and American Idol are the new beacons of American thought.

Speaking of the American public, they don’t care how the goods they require in their daily lives get to where they have to go whether it’s Wal-Mart, Home Depot or whichever grocery store serves their market. They never have, never will and “we” are wasting our time trying to ever change their minds. Trucking is a transparent resource in America. We are like flushing crap down a toilet. Nobody cares how it works or where it goes or what it costs. Just make it happen. We represent the “help” of the country- servants – to be seen only because we drive vehicles so large but not to be heard from. Like children. And OOIDA has no clue other than to go on and on and on writing useless letters and “testifying” before a bureaucratic do-nothing Congress while the big carriers laugh and do whatever the heck they want behind “our” backs. I would go as far to say that Rather’s piece was an utter waste of time. Better to cover the dead birds in the Gulf like the rest of the brain dead media and let the ills of trucking wallow its own self pity. We all know truckers whine a great game but are clueless and powerless as to how to change anything. It’s pathetic.

If I get one more comment that asks me why am I so angry I’ll puke. Go to the supermarket, go to the doctor, try buying a car or truck, look at your phone or cable bill, what is the cost of a “good” education? Go out to lunch and have two salads and ice tea and the bill is $20. The typical apartment where I live costs $1000 a month without utilities. Some things are cheaper now than they were 10 years ago and others – like healthcare – have skyrocketed. What has remained the same? Truckers income. If you made $.40/mile 10 years ago you are making exactly that now or less. Five years from now you will be making $.42.mile or less. Ten years from now you will be making exactly the same. Nothing else in your life will remain as constant as your “trucker” pay. The price of a gallon of milk, now about $3.25/gallon will be about $4.50/gallon. Going out to dinner for those salads will soon cost $25. Your cable bill will double and the cost to see a doctor will triple. And you will be making the same or less than you do now and you will still have to be OTR for four weeks or more to “eeek” by. You, as we’ve read here in LOTR, will probably be dead at age 61. Your family will be lucky if they can afford the funeral to bury you. And Dan Rather did a piece about it on HDNet – so what, who cares, zero, zilch, nothing. How can anybody respect an industry that doesn’t respect itself?