The Sky is Falling. Part 1. Panic.

Big-Everything-Under-One-Roof-Mart is like a huge stuffed lion on the savannah. It threatens by its very presence - eek, a big lion! It consumes no gazelles. Yet invariably some of the erstwhile gazelle prey panic and fall into a dead faint at the sight of it. Then the bodies decay and the bones keep piling up. Soon crowds of gazelles are pointing fearfully in the direction of the big stuffed lion - Shock 'n Awe! - Look How Much That Lion Eats!

I left LA in the mid-1980s, and never looked back. I moved to a remote realm where the deer and the cantaloupe play, where the life pace is slightly above snail. The biggest stressor is remembering who moves first at a four-way stop-sign intersection. Life is slower here. Yet, sadly, some of the loudest complaints I heard when I moved here were over the slow pace. People griping that it takes so long to get things done. People sitting and wondering why nothing is happening. The natives get restless, but not restless enough to actually make things happen.

Then, one day, Big-Everything-Under-One-Roof-Mart moved in. All of a sudden it was PANIC TIME! This behemoth is gonna eat all our local-owned businesses!!

Let's not mention that most of these same businesses are the ones owned by the complainers whining that Nothing Ever Gets Done.

The sky, which had been falling before solely because nobody would take responsibility for holding it up, now threatened to plummet to earth at a heart-stopping pace, and even the swiftest of snail shall be crushed!

Ohh Noooo, Mr Bill!!!

We cannot mention that the local businesses which were going to go out of business while sniveling in the shadow of the monster are (gasp...) the same ones that were teetering on the brink of the Grand Canyon of Nonexistence well before the monster moved into the neighborhood.

We dare not mention that, in more densely populated realms, Big-Everything-Under-One-Roof-Mart monsters move in every day and do not consume all the small businesses before lunchtime.

We're all gonna diiieeee!!!

We don't even mention that those small businesses who kept their doors wide open, their calm faces on, and their customer service to their prior high standards are doing just fine, thanks, and have not been eaten alive. In FACT, some of those small businesses have actually expanded, moved to larger quarters, even built their own buildings.

Every inhabitant on every savannah has its natural enemies and its position on the food chain, even when the biggest survival threats are entropy and self-consuming panic.

Disclaimer: I do not work for Big-Everything-Under-One-Roof-Mart, have not been paid anything to mention Big-Everything-Under-One-Roof-Mart in this blog, and haven't even shopped at Big-Everything-Under-One-Roof-Mart in the past few months. My business did not suffer a single cent of lost revenue to the presence of Big-Everything-Under-One-Roof-Mart. Also, I take no pleasure from the misery of others, real or imagined, external or internal. I do, however, know what to do at a four-way stop-sign intersection - and that alone puts me several steps closer to the front of the herd.