Saying goodbye to the little things.

     Driving through Virginia yesterday on the way to a family wedding in North Carolina, I saw signs before every rest stop on I-77 saying the stop ahead would be closed as of July 21. I thought it odd that the state would be closing its rest stops - probably for renovation, I thought - at the busiest tourist season of the year. Then I learned they aren't closing for a redo, they are closing to cut costs.
    And it's happening not just in Virginia, it's happening all across the country, and could affect all 2,500 of the nation's interstate rest stops. Virginia figures it can can save $19 million a year by closing its 19 rest stops. Those numbers give one pause, indeed, and strictly from an accounting point of view, it's hard to justify a million-dollar-a-year outlay just to maintain what is basically a bricks-and-mortar porta potty. Schools can use the money. Libraries and roads can use it. Dairymen in desperate need of low-interest financing could certainly use that money.
    But I must say I've always been comforted by the ease of travel on the interstate system - except for I-95, which deserves its own non-travel category - and knowing that, every 50 to 100 miles I could stop, use the facilities, stretch, buy some stale crackers, a bottle of outrageously expensive water and a cup of the world's absolutely worst coffee.
     (The official unfounded rumor I am starting today is this: interstate rest stops recycle used Dunkin' Donuts grounds in their coffee vending machines. You heard it here first, and this could be bigger non-news than Michael Jackson's funeral, God rest his troubled soul.)
    But I digress. Rest stop convenience isn't that big a deal. There are plenty of interchanges with truck stops along the way, and plenty of bushes between interchanges. And big problems are all around us, causing pain and grief as people lose their homes, jobs, businesses, abandon their dreams and succumb to despair. As a people, I like to think we've always been able to tough it through the big problems - wars, racial strife, economic travails, terrorists from within, terrorists from without - and we've been bloodied and battered, but always been just a tad stronger and straighter for having fought back and won.
    I know rest stops are a little thing. What's scary to me is that my country can no longer afford the little things.

    Milton Hershey is known around the world for his candy and, closer to home, his philanthropy. The Milton Hershey School, founded in 1909, has been a haven for disadvantaged young people for a full century. For decades, it was a home for boys, providing them with educations, trade and farming skills and a safe and secure place to grow up. The student body now includes 1,800 boys and girls from low income families with at least one parent absent. Lancaster Farming correspondent Sue Bowman paid a visit to Dearden House which has been repurposed first from a farmhouse to student housing and, most recently, an administration building. Her story is in Section B of the edition due in your mailbox tomorrow.