Not So Long Ago This Stuff was Free

 ~  In the Land of the Blind, the Man with One Eye is Tired of Paying for Stuff that Should Be Free.  ~

                The old-timers tell the tales at the Elks Club and at McDonald’s in the pre-rush hour morning.  They weave fantastical stories of a time when people couldn’t own an island, an age when millionaires would occasionally take a break from telling strike breakers which workers’ legs to smash with clubs and toss nickels to crowds of poor people, an era when all of the items in The Dollar Store only cost a dollar.  Yes, they sound like make-believe, but those stories are true. 

                We don’t HAVE to accept the fact that a lot of things that once were free now aren’t.  We probably will, but we don’t necessarily have to.  We still have the capacity to generate power with a mule and a large wooden spool with giant spokes.  We can still hitchhike.  Tap water is still a reality, even if we’re all too afraid to drink it. 

                What happened to the HOV lane?  I remember when the HOV lane was a nice gesture, a friendly wink and a nod from the Department of Transportation to us, the weary commuter.  It went a long way to encourage car-pooling to work.  It’s a grand idea, simple and unrealistic, but grand.  I remember when all you needed to fake your way into the HOV lane was a life-sized inflatable sex doll dressed in a business suit.  Now you have to join some kind of secret club and clubs have dues.  It didn’t used to, but now it costs money. 

                HOV stands for “High-Occupancy Vehicle” and even the DOT, not a governmental agency known for its common sense, declared that two people was enough to qualify for High Occupancy.  That was generous of them.  They set the bar so low that even a country as wildly in love with our cars as America could jump that hurdle.  Some travelers complied.  The HOV lane was doing just fine, beckoning us to consider sharing a ride with someone we weren’t legally obligated to cart around, maybe someone with a different political affiliation or someone of a different race, like they do on IHOP commercials.  The HOV lane was fine.  Then they changed it.  They made it an exclusive club like first-class seating on an airplane, like the Champagne Room at a strip club, like MENSA but with an easier qualifying test.  They started to charge us for something that once was free and called it a “high-occupancy toll” lane, a HOT lane.

                Of course nothing can top the lunacy of bottled water.  Unbelievable, the gall of it!  Since the Precambrian Age (roughly 4.6 billion years ago to about 542 million years ago), human beings have all silently agreed on one thing---water is free.  Water has always been communal.  We all nodded along in concert at this fact, up until sometime in the 1990’s.  Evian had been around and available for the people who believed that French Alp water was worth paying for.  It does taste different than other waters (I think it’s the ph level, but even I have to do that little American mental justification dance before buying anything that’s that French.)  We had the tap water and the Evian and we went along our merry way, happily drinking tap water until Coke and Pepsi got involved and, once again, screwed everything up for the human race.  Evian is "naive" spelled backwards, but you may know that already. 

                You might also recall a "Leave It to Beaver" episode in which the water is turned off for an afternoon while line work is done.  Beaver goes around selling water to people who are working in the heat.  His parents, of course, berate him because you shouldn't sell people water, something they need to stay alive; that's just immoral.   http://www.tv.com/shows/leave-it-to-beaver/water-anyone-71690/

                Even the lions occasionally have to share the watering hole with the antelopes.  We’re more brutal than lions.  Lions may kill and devour the antelopes, but at least they don’t have the nerve to charge an admittance fee to drink from the watering hole.  The rhinos don’t use their power of eminent domain and confiscate ponds.  The bees don’t kill the flies who want to share the morning dew caught on giant African leaves.  We charge people two bucks for a sixteen-ounce bottle of the stuff that covers 2/3 of the planet.  Was Mel Brooks channeling his inner-Nostradamus when he wrote about “Perri-Air” in the movie “Space Balls”?  I thought it was just a funny joke and not a prediction for how low we were going to sink as a species.

                There was an honest-to-God marketing campaign to scare us away from drinking the water that our parents drank and their parents drank before them (THEIR parents had to find their own damn water).  That’s one of the widely-known, but rarely-discussed, heinously-evil Madison Avenue trends---the spooky ad campaign.  It’s not just for politicians anymore.  Sure, city water may be dirty.  Some of it might even be recycled from your very own toilet water.  But, then again, Dasani might all derive from ProgPower USA music festival Port-A-Potty water.  We don’t know.  We don’t know.  We do, on some hazy level of fake knowledge, the origins of which we can’t precisely place, “know” that bottled water is healthier than tap water.  How do we know this?  They scared us into believing it and even believing that we came to this rational conclusion on our own (that’s the real trick).  Now that’s what I call a successful marketing campaign!  It’s one baby step short of convincing us to send our toes to UNICEF.  It’s one small step for man, one giant leap, in the wrong direction, for mankind away from “teaching” us that airplane glue is the new maple syrup.

                And it’s not ALL capitalism’s fault.  Most of it is.  But not all.  What happened to a kid’s household chores being done for free?  Let’s add that to the list of what is no longer free.  When I was a kid, we all had chores we did routinely, and we never dreamed we’d be charging our folks by the hour.  Our parents never paid us.  It wasn’t a job.  It was just what you, the young member of the family who contributes the least to its financial well-being, could do to help the family unit.  You’d walk the dog.  You’d wash the clothes.  You’d paint the attic.  My friends who have procreated get little to no work out of their children these days.  What gives?  Aren’t we at least kind of still into the idea of child labor?  It’s not immoral to make your kids do stuff around the house.  It won’t land you on the news if you actually parent your child.  (Well, sometimes it does, but Fox News needs headlines, too.)  Why would a parent pay a kid to earn his or her keep?  Chores done for free used to be standard, something you did as a kid before you were allowed, or even forced, to “go outside and play”. 

                Kids today are so attuned to the ideas of capitalism and so removed from a time when not doing what your parents told you to do would land you a whoopin’ that I know of multiple sets of parents who have to pay their offspring for each individual chore they do.  My parents weren’t strict authoritative types and yet even I had to do chores as a kid.  Chores used to be free.  Now they’re not.  See, it’s not just a marketing thing.  It’s everywhere. 

                Don’t buy into it, bad pun intended.