Bonzer Words!: Let's All Panic!
...I hear there was a man who, when he read that smoking causes cancer, gave up reading. I have every sympathy with him, though I could never give up reading, even if it were proven to shorten my life...
Wendy Ogbourne suggests that we should forget our worries and enjoy our lives.
Wendy writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
We all know that there are many frightening things going on the world today, but don't the media love to scare us!.
I read a story in a Sunday newspaper recently about a man who lived on the east coast of Australia. In fact his house was on the beach. He had been warned by a scientific report that his patch of coastline could well be washed away in the next fifty years, due to rising sea levels caused by global warning. They advised him to move inland. His response to that was that he loved living where he did and saw no reason to change his lifestyle because of something that might never happen. He would deal with it if he had to. Bravo! A man who refuses to be panicked.
Recent election campaigns were run largely by playing on people's fears. Fear of terrorism, fear of getting sick, fear of old age, fear of missing out on something that someone else is getting, and fear of the unknown. This climate of fear that is now worldwide has so changed our way of life and eroded our democratic freedoms that the terrorists have largely won already.
Apart from terrorism and climate change, we are constantly reminded of the dangers of most of the things we eat or do. Many of the drugs we take on our doctors' advice appear to be doing us more harm than good. Using computers will give us bad posture and tension headaches. We should not eat butter or saturated fats of any kind, drink only low-fat milk and eat light cheese, which has no taste. Coffee is bad for us, as is chocolate and red meat. Alcohol is either bad for us, or good for us, depending on your point of view. Additives to toothpaste, deodorants and even talcum powder can be harmful. BBQs can cause cancer.
Every time we get into our cars we risk becoming a road statistic. Will we really be better off to live to a hundred, if we are frightened into giving up so many of the things that give us pleasure and allow us to go about our daily lives? I hear there was a man who, when he read that smoking causes cancer, gave up reading. I have every sympathy with him, though I could never give up reading, even if it were proven to shorten my life.
Apparently the asteroid Toutakis passed close to the earth. By 'close', we mean just 1.5 million kilometres, four times the distance to the moon. However, the media took great delight in telling us that, according to some sources, there was a 63% chance that it could have hit the earth, and we would all have been annihilated. Though we escaped that one, there are doubtless many more bits of space debris out there on similar trajectories. I don't propose to give this a moment's thought.
None of us can foretell what will happen to us in the future, but I can't live the rest of whatever life is left to me, be it long or short, worrying about so many disasters that may never happen. If I do that, I won't have time to enjoy the life I have now.
© Wendy Ogbourne
