We were in Sam’s Club today, when one of the staff came by to our cashier and said, “They’re closing all the gas stations until Tuesday. If you don’t get gas by 4, you won’t be able to get any all weekend.”
The woman in front of us in line turned to us and said, “That’s not true. My sister just called me and it’s only a rumor.”
Indeed, it was only a rumor. But that didn’t stop people from being lemmings.
On our way home, we ran into heavy traffic right after we got off the JFX. “I bet it’s the gas stations up at the corner that are causing this,” I said to P. A police car blasted its siren a few times as it tried to go up the median to the scene of the congestion.
I turned down a side street and took a detour home. When we got there, the same thing was happening in front of our house–a line of traffic had formed trying to get to the Royal Farms a block away. I had to drive through alleys to get home. After unloading the groceries, I turned on the TV and caught a report of how widespread the madness was.
So I took a little walk up the street to document how much humans are like lemmings. It seems everyone is so ready right now to believe the worst case scenario, to be frightened into irrational behavior. People didn’t seem to care that the Governor was denying the truth of what they had heard, or that the gasoline stations were telling them it wasn’t true. They were creating the crisis all on their own.
