Category Archives: Fear

06/03/2024
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Childhood Misconceptions, Fear

783 Words: A Nation of Involuntary Drunkards and Other Nonsense

Following swiftly on the heels of my last post, CNN this morning ran an online story about a terrifying new disease. The article was placed at the top of the right hand column, a position normally reserved for news that’s a hair less urgent than Putin making a nuclear threat or Taylor Swift dating that football player. In other words, CNN sees it as Big Big News. Just not Big Big Big News.

So, what’s this horrifying malady we all have to cry ourselves to sleep over now?

It’s called auto-brewery syndrome, as you can see by the headline. Apparently, if you have it all the carbohydrates you ingest in a normal day ferment within you, just the way vintners ferment grapes or brewers ferment hops or whatever the hell they make beer out of these days. Acc’d’g to Wikipedia, the thing is also called gut fermentation syndrome, endogenous ethanol fermentation, or drunkenness disease.

Also, if you have it, you’re in peril of failing a blood-alcohol road test even if you haven’t had a pop in days, weeks, or months. Years, even. That can be a tad annoying should a state trooper pull you over and make you blow. For pity’s sake you could lose your license for two full years in the state of Indiana for a first offense.

You think there’s scads of grown men on those little putt-putt scooters on SR 46 now? (Indiana allows people convicted of DUI to motor down even 55-mph roadways w/o a drivers license — a state law only marginally less absurd than open carry.) Just wait until all the jillions of folks nailed simply because their bellies are the equivalent of wine vats.

A person suffering auto-brewery syndrome, essentially, can be denied driving privileges or even jailed in certain circumstances simply for eating buttered toast in the morning.

Thank god in heaven CNN’s editors and reporters are hot on this story. How much of our innocent population is at risk? A fifth? A  third? More than half?

Turns out — again, acc’d’g to Wikipedia — there’ve been four reported cases since 2001. Add to that one case of urinary fermentation wherein the sufferer peed a positive alcohol test.

So five. Five goddamned people have had this disorder in the entire 21st century. Five.

Okay, maybe six, since this woman mentioned on the CNN website today isn’t included in Wikipedia’s case studies.

So, six.

Six out of 336,526,049 people, this holy land’s population per the US Census Bureau (when you go there via the link, you’ll see a different figure as the total is constantly rising). That is one in every 56,087,674.8 Americans, using this AM’s figures.

Does that even merit a mention on one of this nation’s premier news outlets?

Is it worth scaring the crap out of at least a certain percentage of readers and viewers?

I guarantee a significant few folks are, as we speak, fretting over whether or not they have this illness. Okay, they may be neurotics, sure, but does CNN need to push their buttons?

I said it the other day and I’ll say it again: Please stop tring to scare the hell out of us!

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What bizarre misconceptions did you have as a child? I had a whole basket-full of them. Here’s one:

I taught myself how to read by thumbing through the World Book Encyclopedia. I was fascinated by the volume that showed a cut-away view of the Earth (probably in the E volume, one of the thinner tomes — the C volume was huge as was the M; it took me a couple of years to work my way up to those challenges).

Anyway, I learned that the very thin layer upon which we walk and drive is called the Earth’s crust. I started seeing the Earth as analogous to a loaf of Ma’s homemade bread.

Ma’s Homemade Bread Was Crusty, Too.

Then one day, I saw workers jackhammer a big hole into the pavement on Natchez Avenue, our street. The concrete looked to be about six or so inches thick. Below it was a seemingly endless depth of mud or clay. Naturally, I assumed the concrete was the Earth’s crust and that wherever there wasn’t pavement or concrete, other workers had already broken up and hauled away so much of the Earth’s crust.

Therefore, our backyard was the bared layer (the mantle, as I’d learn when I finally got around to that M volume) that exists below the crust. Our front yard too. The Earth, I concluded, in its natural state was covered with a six-inch layer of concrete. Dirt or lawn or whatever was an unnatural state made by workers with jackhammers.

Hey, I was a city kid; whaddya want from me?

05/29/2024
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Fear, News Media

677 Words: For The Birds

I suppose we all agree: things are pretty fucked up. Climate change, the rise of right wing authoritarianism, the wealth gap, gun violence, war, racism, nativism, this-ism, that-ism. The list goes on, ad infinitum.

Truth is, things are really no more fucked up today than they were yesterday, last year, last century, and last millennium.

Since we became human, we’ve been killing each other, oppressing each other, raping the land, fouling the air and water, owning slaves, dropping bombs, sticking our noses in other people’s sex lives, slugging our spouses, and every other atrocity you may care to name.

Listen to, watch, or read the news on any channel, on any website, (I almost wrote in any newspaper but who reads them?) and you’ll want to jump off the roof of a tall building. Kids don’t walk home alone from school anymore, people don’t hitchhike, and everybody’s barricading themselves in their living rooms and dens because The World Is A Dangerous Place.

Many Americans think crime has gotten crazily out of hand. Yet, law enforcement statistics show that the crime rate has steadily declined since the end of the pandemic and, even before that, it had been plummeting since the 1970s.

Truth is, the real danger is the news on any channel, on any website, and — yes — in any newspaper (for the six or seven of you who still do that old thing).

Listening to Morning Edition on NPR yesterday morning, I learned about a horrible disease that threatens everybody in this frightened nation. Public health experts and medical scientists are working feverishly to determine the range and scope of this next epidemic. Reporters are interviewing people at risk. Politicians must be made aware of this existential threat. Oh, what are we to do?

The disease? Bird flu. NPR spent three minutes on it, next to a lifetime in electronic media.

Y’wanna know how many people have gotten bird flu this year? Two.

Two human beings out of a United States population of more than 336 million.

Twenty people, on average, are killed by lightning each year in the United States. More than a hundred people drown in their own bathtubs each year in the US. So, thunderstorms and taking a bath are far more dangerous to us than bird flu. In fact, two people were killed by shark bites in the United States last year, making that peril much more scarifying than bird flu, considering bird flu hasn’t killed anybody this year.

And if I were an NPR radio news reporter, I’d be obligated to append “Yet…” to that statement because, god knows, bird flu might be the next disaster in the making.

Two people, for chrissakes!

“Stop scaring us!” I shouted at the radio as the true nature of the bird flu menace became apparent.

In fact, that’s the whole aim of the news these days, to scare the hell out of us. When corporate and mainstream media pose everything as a threat to our lives, we become less and less able to identify the real dangers out there.

If Trump becomes president, we’re doomed. If Biden remains president, we’re doomed. If Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito aren’t kicked off the US Supreme Court right now, we’re doomed. If teenagers keep on wondering about their genders, we’re doomed. If we continue to drive cars and ride in airplanes, we’re doomed. If sea levels rise, we’re doomed. If we mow our lawns too much, we’re doomed. If we forgive college loan debt, we’re doomed. If we let people mail in their ballots in the November election, we’re doomed.

Make no mistake, there are existential threats. For instance, burning fossil fuels since the onset of the Industrial Revolution has indeed put us and much of the world’s life at some sort of risk over the next few decades. But, jeez, not every freaking thing is going to wipe us all out. Certainly not shark bites, bathtub drownings, lightning strikes, Biden’s second term, or bird flu.

Trump regaining the presidency? Well, lemme think about that one for a bit.

 

02/15/2017
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Fear

Hot Air: Missing

One upon a time kids played outdoors. Most kids, in fact, if my own recollections are any indication, burst out of the house early in the morning and had to be cajoled or even threatened to come back inside for any reason, even the dark of night.

I’d started leaving the block when I was nine years old. I’d discovered a bunch of cool kids who lived on the adjoining street. At any moment after school or, during summer vacation, all day long, my mother had no idea where I was. If push came to shove, she’d have to hunt me down, which wasn’t all that difficult. We were outside playing, in the sunshine and fresh air, running and making a racket. All she’d have to do was look for a bunch of kids and I’d be sure to be among them.

The kids I hung out with on Natchez and Nashville avenues on the Northwest Side of Chi., drank water surreptitiously from neighbors’ garden hoses and knew where all the most hidden-away niches were when the urge to get rid of said water arose. Drinking and peeing at home were ill-considered choices — moms had a tendency to say outlandish things like, “Why don’t you stay in for a change as long as you’re here.” In my neck of the woods, an otherwise sweet-sounding mom suggestion carried the authority of a Tsarist ukase.

As I approached my teens, I’d hop on my bike — with my baseball mitt hung on the handlebars — and race to either Amundsen or Riis parks where dozens of us would play ball from morning to night. In fall, we’d play football. In winter, we’d make snow forts.

Never once were we concerned about any dangers from kidnappers or murderers. And, quite frankly, neither were our parents.

There was a societal understanding that kid-snatching was as likely an occurrence as a lightning strike.

That was true then — and it’s still true today.

Yet, talk to anyone and you’ll hear about how bad and dangerous it is out there these days. The fact of the matter is, it’s all bullshit. Violent crime has been going down for decades. The rate of child abductions has remained at a steady level for nearly a century. And missing kids generally are snatched by one or another estranged parent.

Nevertheless, parents have turned to helicoptering. Today, kids don’t ride bikes to soccer practice. They don’t saunter over to their friends’ houses and yell out, “Yo, Jimmayy!” as we did. Sure there are devices and mind-numbing electronic games to be played in the dark of the basement but much — maybe most — of this change has come about because Americans believe the world of 2017 is inherently dangerous, that kidnappers lurk around every corner, and that bad men would infiltrate every gang of kids playing softball in order to sell them packets of heroin.

All bullshit.

The genesis tale of this delusion occurred in 1979, the morning of May 25th, to be precise. At 8:00am, six-year-old Etan Patz of the SoHo neighborhood in New York City, was sent off by his parents to catch his school bus a couple of blocks away. They’d never see him again.

When little Etan did not return home that afternoon, his parents called the school and learned he hadn’t shown up. The police were notified and a door-to-door search was conducted. A police helicopter hovered overhead as bloodhounds sniffed every nook and cranny. Radio and television stations broadcast a number the public could call with information about the kid’s whereabouts.

Nobody had any idea what’d happened to Etan for more than three decades until a guy who lived near Philadelphia called them and said he suspected his brother-in-law might have had something to do with the disappearance. The brother-in-law, Pedro Hernandez, a New Jersey factory worker, was brought in, grilled and copped to the kidnapping and murder. He was tried in 2015 but acquitted when a lone juror bought the defense argument that Hernandez was mentally unstable and so his repeated confessions could not be trusted. Hernandez was tried again beginning late last year and Monday the jury finally returned a guilty verdict.

In the weeks after Etan’d gone missing, television stations in New York and then throughout the region gave nightly updates on the case. Eventually, Etan Patz became national news. Etan’s face was the first to appear on a milk carton. For nearly a half century now, kids — and their parents — have been confronted by the smiling, innocent faces of kidnapped kids as they crunch their breakfast cereal in the morning. In 1983, President Reagan declared the date Etan disappeared National Missing Children’s Day. The disappearance of Etan Patz led to our so-far decades-long national obsession with missing children.

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Etan’s photogenic, grinning face touched our hearts. Even though kids had been snatched and killed in the past, Etan’s case hit us and hit us bad. After him, common knowledge had it — has it — that allowing a kid merely to leave the house is to invite kidnapping and murder.

The only truth to emerge from this sad tale is not that kids are especially at risk but that we are awfully prone to believing untruths.

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