Little Stories: How Gerbils Changed My Worldview
Without meaning to, the little rodents taught me an important lesson.
Little Stories, focusing on memories from my youth, is a recurring feature of Inconspicuous Consumption. You can see more Little Stories here.
As I’ve mentioned before, I was born in 1964, so most of my early memories are from the early and mid-1970s. And one thing I remember from that period is a general sense that the world was, well, pretty messed up. At school we were taught all sorts of things about how America and the world were so wonderful, but meanwhile there were all sorts of grown-up things going on in the background that told a different story. I didn’t really understand most of these grown-up things, at least not fully, but they nonetheless entered my consciousness via the evening news, my parents’ and big brothers’ discussions with their friends, and so on. And even if I couldn’t understand these things, I could tell that they were Bad. Among them:
Watergate.
The Arab oil embargo and the resulting energy crisis.
High inflation coupled with high unemployment.
The stock market crash.
The latter phases of the Vietnam War.
The Cold War and the growing nuclear arms race.
The New York City financial crisis. (We lived on Long Island, so we got a lot of NYC-related news.)
Lots of air pollution and litter, epitomized by the “crying Indian” TV commercial.
And so on. I want to make it clear that none of these things had a direct negative impact on my life, my happiness, or our family. We weren’t super-wealthy, but we had a nice enough home, food on the table each night, and other trappings of a stable, middle-class existence. I ran around our backyard having fun, playing with my friends, and all the other things you’d expect a suburban kid to do.
Still, because of all those Bad things going on in the background, I gradually absorbed the idea that the world was a dysfunctional mess, and that this dysfunction had become the norm. That probably sounds very pessimistic and cynical, like I was choosing despair over hope, but I don’t mean it that way. I don’t think I even consciously thought about it at the time — it was more like one of those obvious, self-evident things that were just a given: The sky was blue, water was wet, and the world was a mess.