Sooey, pigs!

When I was a kid my family had a semi-tradition known as the Sunday Drive. Hard as it may be to believe in the 21st century, at one point in our nation’s history gas was actually cheap enough that people could drive around aimlessly for hours on end without taking out a bank loan for the privilege.

The quality of such outings tended to be mixed. Some of them were among the most interesting experiences of my childhood. For example, one time we ended up in the woods during one of the cicadas’ cycles. The things were impressively deafening. On the other hand, sometimes the trips were just a lot of aimless driving around on afternoons when something else might otherwise have been going on.

When we lived in Lawrence, one occasional stop on Sunday rambles was a pig farm a few miles outside of town. We’d pull over to the side of the road, and my dad would lean out the window and yell “Sooey!” at them. Every pig in the place would dash for the side of the pen next to the farmhouse, expecting to get fed. Watching them all running around in a big mass was no end of hilarious.

Years later when I told Amy about it, her response was “So your dad lied to pigs?” Sure, if you say it that way it sounds bad.

I’m brought mindful of the Pavlovian response of swine every holiday season on the day after Thanksgiving. There they sit, camped out in the freezing cold, waiting for the mad dash into the pig sty of frenzied consumerism.

Makes me wonder if there’s even any slop in the offing, or if the advertising industry just likes lying to people.

Remember, Friday is Buy Nothing Day. It's not about wrecking the economy (mortgage bankers and oil speculators have already done that for us). It's about sending a plea for sanity to Wall Street and Madison Avenue.