Let’s Share Some Sacrifice
Old people are always complaining about how things were harder when they were young.
Walking to school in the snow, uphill both ways, that whole thing. So forgive me as I embark on what initially might feel like that old man trope, but stay with me. I’m trying to make a larger point, and I have to start with a few stories of how things were in the Before Times.
So. Back when I was a kid, Big Things That Were Not Entirely In Our Control would happen. Presidents and Governors would get on the (usually black-and-white) TV, imploring us — all of us, mind you, every single citizen of these United States — to do something that would help alleviate the situation. The actions we were asked to take weren’t particularly terrifying — it’s not like we were getting called up to war (though the last-ever draft, for Vietnam, was still fresh in everyone’s mind.)
No, these politicians were imploring us, in the main, to conserve shared resources. I lived in California, and every five or ten years there’d be a pretty bad draught. The Governor would ask us to stop watering our lawns, to take shorter showers, to “let it mellow if it was yellow,” that kind of thing. On the national front, we had rolling OPEC crises, which meant gas rationing — depending on whether your license plate ended in an odd or even…