Well It's Been One Ride
I dare say that this could just as easily be filed under Politics as we have so much going on in Washington. Then we have Corona. The lockdown is still in place, vaccinations are rolling along smoother than I had anticipated. My husband and I are still waiting on ours though. 🤷 But we will get it sooner or later. Until then one can only continue to practice good hygiene and pray for the best.
Even with all of that said and done this year has the potential to be less bumpy than 2020 turned out to be.
There are those years that (decades even) that will stay in your personal and collective memory. The energy crisis of the 70s was one of those that will stay in my memory for as long as I live. I had just gotten my license when it all started and that set precedence for how I would conserve fuel throughout my life. If paying $4.00 a gallon sounds like a lot (those were May of 1974 prices) you need to take into account that I was only making $2.05 an hour. That was only slightly better than minimum wage, which had also been set to $2.00 that year. Now it is over $7.00 which would have been the wage payed to mangers and the like back then and gas is still less than $4.00 a gallon. Which was $2.49 yesterday when I filled up my tank.
It has been one hell of a ride leading up to today. While I grant you that it could have been a lot worse it has surpassed my wildest expectations. To be honest, there isn’t a time in my life in which I could have hazard to guess things would developed like they have in the last eighteen months.
Could they get worse? Sure, they always can. But I don’t think that they will.
As a side note on the image up top. I always found it humorous, it has been shown on and off over the years, the “stealers” part makes me smile. We do have a word for such people. We call them thieves. The usages is also rhythmically unnecessary. If we were to break it into three parts:
- Gas Stealers
- Beware
- We’re loaded for bear
Only lines two and three rhyme, thus thieves would be just as fitting, Gas Thieves. Now if they had chosen something like more fitting to the hunting analogy they strike in the last half, poachers would also work:
- Gas Poachers
- Beware
- We’re loaded for bear
Regardless, the energy crisis of the 1970s brought out a lot of interesting traits in people, much like the current pandemic and political landscape has in our contemporary lives.