Not long ago, I was part of an experiment involving several vats of sour gummy worms. A few family members and friends and I attended a Minnesota United Soccer game one Saturday at Allianz Field. The Loons won, by an impressive margin, so we were ambling home in high spirits, still humming “Wonderwall,” when we encountered something bizarre. Exiting the stadium, we saw a scrum of people swirling around two yellow-vested volunteers and a few giant black bins that would other- wise be used to transport trash or laundry. We couldn’t tell what was going on. Everyone around those black bins was moving erratically, plunging into the center of the scrum and darting back out again, clutching packages of something, stuffing them in their pockets, and running off into the night.
My cousin elbowed his way into the mess first and emerged with four bags of sour gummy worms. Volunteers from Target, a sponsor of MNUFC, were giving them out for free, and they had thousands. We all followed and reached into the bins to get our own sour gummy worms. We politely thanked the volunteers and continued to make our way home.
We were happy with our good fortune. If only we had turned the other way then.
Making our way clockwise around the sidewalk that borders the sta- dium, we noticed another crowd forming around similarly yellow-vested volunteers and giant black bins we now knew contained thousands of bags of sour gummy worms. My cousins and brother registered what was at stake here and ran, full speed, to collect more. The rest of us followed. Regrouping, we looked around at all of the gummy worms we had gathered and started laughing. It wasn’t maniacal laughter yet but it was on the verge. Our initial docility upon realizing there were free gummy worms everywhere had given way to something much more frightening. My brother had bags and bags in his hands, the hood of his jacket, his pocket, and his clear plastic bag and my cousins had even more. All I could hear was laughter. We were all beside ourselves. I supposed that this was utopia.
People were throwing bags of these gummy worms in the air, stuffing them between their arms and into zipped up jackets, filling bags and bags with them, and ripping them open and letting the candies fall all over their faces. A man with a drum on the side of the road had amassed a mountain of them and people kept throwing more bags of gummy worms onto it. A woman came up next to me and said, “Do you have a bag to spare?” Bewildered at how she hadn’t yet gotten any gummy worms I tossed one of my bags over to her and she thanked me profusely and skipped away. Where was I?
We finally left the premises with what we imagined to be upwards of fifty bags of brightly colored sugar-coated sour gummy worms. We could not stop laughing. We got in the car and my cousin, who at this point had 14 bags, suddenly stopped laughing and said, “Wait. I’m missing one.”
My dad asked us to open one of our bags so we could taste these gummy worms we were suddenly rich in but we all refused. We had pounds and pounds, more than we could count, and not one of us would relent and open one bag. It was madness. This was the exper- iment: give us more than enough and see what we would do with it. There is precedent for this I must examine if I am to understand what happened to us that night.
A similar experiment was once conducted in Ancient Rome. Politi- cians would provide free wheat to citizens as food, and circus games as entertainment in a practice Roman poet Juvenal called “bread and circus.” With more than enough, the masses were sated and distracted and so happy they were blind to whatever politicians needed them to be blind to. Juvenal wrote in The Satires, “...they shed their sense of responsibility Long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob That used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything, Curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only, bread and circuses.”
I do not believe the experiment last Saturday was politically motivated. I do not believe it was even meant to be an experiment. It was a mar- keting scheme perhaps gone too far. “Bread and circus” is an example of what happens when people have more than enough. It doesn’t make for stability exactly but for intense if superficial bliss. And do we need stability if we have bliss? Do we need stability if we have sour gummy worms? These questions I have yet to answer.
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