The Old Coot is a victim? Tioga County Courier and Owego Pennysaver Article of 9/7/22

 The Old Coot’s world is shrinking.

By Merlin Lessler

 I’m not a conspiracy theorist, though I was one for a while when I was a kid and learned that the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny weren’t real. An, then came the biggest lie of all, told to me by my mother when I was five years old, and on a gurney, waiting to go into the operating room for a tonsillectomy, “Don’t be afraid; the doctor will take a rose out of a drawer for you to smell and you’ll go asleep. After it’s over you can have ice cream.” WHAT A LIE! No rose, just the same ether the ear doctor used when he put me out to puncture my ear drum when I had an ear ache. Ice cream? It was two weeks of swallowing hell before that came true.

 OK, there really was a conspiracy going on to ease me through childhood. But today, I don’t believe in the conspiracy theories that infuse society in general, and social media addicts in particular. UNTIL NOW! It has dawned on me that the fashion industry is executing a full-blown conspiracy. A conspiracy between designers and manufacturers to use less cloth in their garments.

 My Irish heritage has cursed me with skinny arms. I was OK when short sleeve shirts came down to my elbows. The one I put on the other day, barely made it past my shoulder, exposing my chicken bone arms to the world. It is why I often wear long sleeve shirts in the summer and roll up the sleeves to stay cool, literally and figuratively.

 But, the exposure of my skinny arms isn’t the point. The conspiracy that is going on to reduce the amount of material in garments is real. A little bit of cloth here, a little there, adds up to an enormous amount of cloth the manufacturers don’t have to buy. And, it’s not just shirts, pants are so skinny that men look like they are wearing tights. Shorts are shorter. No longer down to the knee, but working their way up the leg. Who knows how high they will go. This garment industry conspiracy is just like the food industry conspiracy that has been shrinking the size of cans, cereal boxes, ice cream containers and just about everything else. The world is shrinking around me! Or, am I just paranoid?