Not Our First Rodeo

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This may not be the case everywhere, but many of the places I've seen around here have the younger people in a major panic over the COVID-19, while the older people seem to be taking it in stride. There's a reason for that. For many of the millennials, this is their first major crisis ever. They were not born, or were too young to remember, when 9/11 happened. People my age? This is not our first rodeo. Not even close. I was looking through some of the things that happened in 1960, the year I was born. It reminded me of how turbulent the 60s were. Peaceful segregation protests in 1960 (the lunch counter "sit-in" in North Carolina happened in 1960) turned into riots with curfews, National Guard troops guarding the streets, and even the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King by the end of the decade. Out of toilet paper? We had the Arab oil embargo of the mid-70s. The reason the nationwide speed limit used to be 55 MPH (to the dismay of Sammy Hagar) was because of the Arab oil embargo. In fact, most states imposed "gas rationing," where you could only fill up your car on an even numbered or odd numbered day depending on whether the last number on your license plate was even or odd. We've had our medical crises, too: the '76 swine flu epidemic that never happened, AIDS, and Legionnaire's disease were just a few of the things we had scaring people when they were new. And we had it easy: our parents endured the Depression (which lasted a decade, not just ten weeks) and World War II. So, us older folks are just taking it in stride. Nothing we can do to change it, anyway. Vern Gosdin's song about multiple trips around the block: