Saturday Morning Cartoons
And now for something completely different. Do you know what an ear worm is? It’s a song that enters through your ear and just won’t leave your brain. Since the current economic crisis started, I’ve had this ear worm that I just can’t get rid of.
It started in my childhood watching cartoons on Saturday morning. My memory told me that it was Bugs Bunny singing a song called, “We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again.” Right song, wrong cartoon as it turns out. After a half hour of Googling, I found a video of a Merrie Melodies cartoon (produced by Leon Schlesinger, one of the early Bugs Bunny producers) called Fifth Column Mouse. It came out in the middle of World War II and was about a bunch of little mice banding together to take on an evil cat who represented the Axis powers. Apparently, the local TV stations were at a loss for content when I was a little kid during the 1960s and ran a lot of repeats, because I still remember the mice singing “We Did It Before…” Here’s the clip — scroll to 5:30 for the key part — it’s less than a minute long so you have to watch it.
So, sorry about that, now the song is stuck in your brain. Here’s why I think that’s a good thing. In the current environment, we have way more than enough negative reinforcement that we’re heading off a cliff and there’s not a lot that can be done about that. When you find yourself overdosing on that line of thinking (and it’s so easy to do right now), I hope you’ll hear those little mice singing, “We did it before.” Last week, I wrote about maintaining our perspective. Each of us have been through difficult circumstances in the past and we’re still here to tell the tales of those times. It’s the same story for all of us collectively. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.
Now, go have a little fun and watch some cartoons. Cheers.