Bonzer Words!: Grievance Day In Our Frightened Society
...Now we are not allowed to trust the purity and quality of anything we buy, unless it is so securely sealed that you have to keep in the kitchen a whole range of tools needed to break the seals, at some risk of damage to hands if the tools should slip...
Ken Sillcock abhors the inordinatly safety-conscious society in which we live.
Gone are the days when the local store-keeper weighed out our pounds of groceries on the big beam balance on his counter. We confidently trusted him to use correct weights and to charge a reasonable price for foods which were pure and wholesome. He even delivered to outlying farm homes, as did the baker, the butcher and the greengrocer. They even gave a bag of lollies for the children when you paid the account at the end of the month. In most of our shopping there was a tradition of fair dealing and trust in mutual honesty.
Now we are not allowed to trust the purity and quality of anything we buy, unless it is so securely sealed that you have to keep in the kitchen a whole range of tools needed to break the seals, at some risk of damage to hands if the tools should slip.
Is it all done just to protect the profits of the makers of various polymers we know as plastics, who are faced with a marked decline in the demand for the plastic shopping bags, so many of which cluttered our landscape, our waterways and drains, and killed children who used them as transparent masks.
Now the plastic films come wrapped tightly around everything that has to be opened, and they defy your efforts to find any built-in place you can tear to remove them. Try to dig into the film with a knife or the point of a scissors blade, and the point slides over the smooth surface and makes a bee-line for the hand holding the object. Then, when you decide to get a band-aid to stop your blood being smeared over everything you handle, you may find that you have first to open a package also tightly wrapped in clear film.
Why can't we have the screw-top bottles and jars from which we could easily unscrew the metal caps? Now they have plastic caps attached to a ring by small pieces which must be broken before the cap will screw off? You have either to attack them with a hacksaw blade or use round-nosed pliers or a larger wrench to unscrew the cap by brute force.
Even the upside-down tomato sauce bottle (no mess, no waste) fails to deliver until you remove a firmly cemented seal hidden by its cap, by pulling-and-pressing on a small plastic film too smooth for the fingers to grip effectively.
And why do so many of the magazines to which you subscribe, and even some of the junk mail you don’t want, come in sealed films into which you dig at your own risk? Surely their contents will not deteriorate in the absence of such 'security'.
If you are busy and defer the task of opening them, other documents are apt to be put on top of them, and the mass of paper will then slide off their smooth surfaces onto the floor.
Finally, why does our frightened society demand that we should be impeded in managing our affairs unless we remember passwords at every turn, and have them changed from time to time so that others cannot use them to dip into our meagre pay and savings?
The honest, sharing and caring society cannot come soon enough!
© Ken Sillcock
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Ken writes for Bonzer! magazine. Please visit www.bonzer.org.au
