As many observers have noted, staying safe has become a religion. "Safetyism," as it is sometimes called, like all religions, places what it values -- in this case, being safe -- above other values. Safetyism explains the willingness of Americans to give up their most cherished values -- including liberty -- in the name of safety for the last year and a half.
-- Dennis Prager
It's an interesting analysis and worth pondering over.
I grew up on a farm, and tended to view a thousand different acts that could occur....that would have ended your life fairly easily.
It'd be like an encounter in the cattle-chute during vaccinations....where you realized the 600-lb calf had turned, and you had 3 seconds to save yourself. Or when you'd entered a 'jungle-like' field to bush-hog, and counted twenty-odd snakes on the ground over a sixty-second period.
There was some type of common sense that you developed, and you could view a situation and just rank your 'doom-situation' as a zero, one, two or three. Three usually meant that your risks were not worth the effort. It'd be like standing on a hill with a lightning storm approaching, and you had two minutes to correct your location.
Prager wrote a fairly long piece, and I'd recommend a read of the essay.
I had a cousin in the early 1960s, at the age of six or seven, who was put on a Greyhound bus by himself in north Alabama.....to get to the family farm in central Alabama. He was given some basic instructions....a bit of pocket money, and the rest was simply trusting Greyhound's folks to deliver him to the station eight hours later (meaning at least two transfers). If you brought up this scenario today? Your neighbors would call the police, and you'd have some kind of endangerment dumped upon you.
I worked with a guy in the 1980s....who'd been given instructions by 'dad' to drive grandma's old car around 1,500 miles...at age 16. This was before GPS, and he admitted that at least three times in the trip....he went off-track by a fifty miles each time.
Fear of the unknown? This is now a daily problem, and you just wonder how bad this will get.
1 comment:
1959.
Nine-years old.
An airliner from Sacramento to Mexico City.
A year as a foreign exchange student.
Another airliner back to Sacramento.
.
Then, the doctor and his wife sent their two sons to live a year with us, one at a time.
One a year younger, the other one year older.
.
Next.
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