The economists and politicians sometimes seem to have forgotten what people are for. In the new global economy, in the Corporate Nation, it seems our ideology is profit and loss and people are now expendable, from family farms to bookstores to small business and independent pharmacies. People are for working in good times and getting tossed into the street in bad times.

If you stand in line at O’Hearn’s Pharmacy and watch Bridget work, or if you listen to Connie Brooks talk to her customers in her bookstore, of you watch Scott Carrino prepare his sandwiches at the Round House Cafe, you understand that there are still some places left that are about people, not just profit, where we still recall what people are for. Those places tend to me in small towns and rural areas, places the government has forgotten.

In these places, people are the point. The new global economy has moved beyond that idea, it is considered inefficient and old-fashioned.

This morning, in the minutes after dawn, when the thermometer was 8 degrees, Maria and I had the pleasure of witnessing this beautiful tableau of people, gathered across the street from Bridget’s pharmacy to celebrate the survival of a rare thing, an independent, family-owned pharmacy.

One day, I waited for a prescription to be filled and a woman came in and burst into tears, she had been fighting with insurance companies and could not get a prescription filled for her sick father until morning. But, she said, she lived two  hours away and could not leave work again, she wasn’t sure what to do. Bridget put her hand on her arm, and asked who her father was.

The woman told him, and Bridget said, “oh, I know him, I know where he lives. I’ll run the prescription out there first thing in the morning.” The woman was astonished, it never occurred to her that Bridget might do that, she had no experience in her life with a pharmacist that would do that, she lived in a suburb outside of Albany.

But Bridget does that all the time. She knows what people are for. And people know what she is for, and that is why so many of us came out on this frigid morning to congratulate her on her great and unlikely triumph.