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How to Live Dangerously
The Hazards of Helmets, the Benefits of Bacteria, and the Risks of Living Too Safe
By Warwick Cairns St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2008 Warwick Cairns
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-8763-9
CHAPTER 1
RUN, HIDE, SAVE YOURSELVES!
A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO MODERN FEARS
THERE ARE any number of places to start a journey into danger. But we will start ours, in this book, in the living room of a suburban house, somewhere in Middle America.
There is a couch in this room, large and pale brown in color, upholstered in leather or leatherette. There is a matching La-Z-Boy recliner, half-reclined, on which a party of Power Ranger figurines sit, surrounded by their various weaponry and accoutrements. A Barbie doll, recently ejected from her position, lies on the carpet before them. Across the room there is a mahogany-colored bookcase-cum-display-unit holding a number of crystal animals, framed family photographs, and ornamental porcelain plates; next to it, by the large picture window, there is another unit, in brushed aluminum, holding a wide-screen television, a DVD player, and a VCR, and beneath them a rather disordered stack of tapes and disks that have recently been rifled through and opened and abandoned and scattered all around by the human occupants of the room, a young boy and a slightly older girl, who are sitting on the floor surrounded by a sea of plastic toys of various shapes and colors. The room had been tidy when their mother left it, no more than ten minutes earlier, to attend to the ironing, but by no stretch of the imagination could it be considered so now. And then words are exchanged between the children, and at some point one pulls the other's hair — or at least, this is what the other says — and the other then pinches the first in retaliation, and "Mom!" one cries, "Mo-om!" And the mother returns to the room and does her best to get to the bottom of it and to restore some semblance of order and harmony. A typical day in a typical home, in fact, such as you'd see in any home in any part of the country.
And it strikes the mother then that it might be a good idea, at that point, to put on a DVD, from the point of view of occupying the children for long enough to get done what needs to be done; but just as she picks up a disk from the floor that she thinks will do the trick, there comes a knock, rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, at the door. And then, a moment later, the same again: rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
No sooner has she opened the door than a pinch-faced little man carrying a clipboard brushes straight past her and marches right into the living room.
"Social Services," he says, by way of explanation.
"I'm sorry?" says the mother.
"Social Services. As I think I already said."
"B-but ...?"
"We have reason to believe," he says, ignoring the interruption, "that you have been exposing your children to unsuitable material. Material of an ... adult nature. In fact ...," he says, spotting the disk in the mother's hand and snatching it from her, "material like this."
He holds up the box. Sesame Street, it says, volumes 1 and 2.
"That's not adult material," says the mother.
"Oh, really?" says the man, turning the box around. "Then how do you explain this?"
And there, printed on the back of the box, is the following warning: These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child.
"These are adult-only Sesame Streets," he says.
"Adult-only?"
"That's what I said. They encourage modeling of dangerous and inappropriate behavior. There is overeating of unhealthy foods in them. ..."
"They're just puppets."
"Muppets, I think you'll find. And dangerously irresponsible muppets at that. The Cookie Monster ... Well, I hardly think that he is a good example to set for your children. Do you know the incidence of diabetes in this country? And as if the eating weren't bad enough, there is smoking. Smoking! The Cookie Monster again, but this time attempting to pass himself off as Alistair Cookie of Monsterpiece Theater. As if that's fooling anyone. And then, to top it all off, there is the eating of the smoking."
"The eating of the smoking?"
"He eats his pipe. Need I say more?"
In 2007, the first episodes of Sesame Street were rereleased on DVD. They were released with a warning that their content was suitable for adults only, and was not to be shown to minors. And then, to avoid the risk of people ignoring the warning and allowing their children to watch them anyway, the scenes were reshot, without the pipe. And then the whole Monsterpiece Theater parody was dropped altogether.
You just can't be too safe these days, it seems.
We live in worried times. For all sorts of reasons, both good ones and bad ones, more people today are more worried about the dangers of life than at any time in history. Previous generations may have had to cope with continual war, grinding poverty, the constant presence of pestilence and famine, and even then — even if they survived being born, which was by no means certain, and even if they managed to avoid the ravages of scurvy and the Black Death — they still lived little longer than the average domestic flea. But it is today that people are really worried.
This is a fact, confirmed again and again by research all over the world.
Survey after survey shows that most people, nowadays, believe the world to be a far more dangerous place now than it was in the past, and they're not happy about it.
Depending on the survey, and depending on the country, the figures show that between 75 and 80 percent believe this to be true. In the United States, the figure is 78 percent.
There are reasons why we believe this to be the case. There seem, just now, to be all sorts of new threats, and all sorts of bad people and bad things out to get us and our children.
To name just a few at random: suicide-bomber terrorism; violent crime; newer, more addictive drugs; binge drinking; secondhand smoke; global warming and the associated floods, famines, and extinctions; "stranger danger"; traffic fumes; the unintended consequences of food additives and vaccinations, the rise in allergies and "intolerances"; antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" in hospitals; AIDS; bird flu; skin cancer from going out in the sun; obesity epidemics from staying indoors; cancer from cell phone tower radiation; bullying in schools; teenage boys with guns; teenage girls with eating disorders; and dodgy Third World dictators with nuclear weapons.
Because of all this, and more, many people have stopped doing, or changed the way they do, many of the things that they used to do when they were younger — because these things are now considered to be too dangerous.
"You just can't do that anymore," they say. "Not like you used to when we were young."
Turn on the TV, and people worry about the dangers of "inappropriate modeling"; let your children play out in the street, and people worry about all the abductors and killers hiding around corners, waiting to snatch them away, or the maniac drivers revving up their engines, waiting to run them over, or the hooded gangs of feral teenagers, waiting to rob them or beat them up, or both; go out for a bite to eat, and there's a whole range of things to worry about, from gluten and lactose intolerances to cholesterol and pesticide residues.
In Sweden, the latest new worry is something known as "electrosensitivity," which involves a belief that exposure to microwaves in the environment makes you ill. Thousands of Swedes now claim to be electrosensitive, as a result of which they have to have their homes specially insulated at great public expense, and wear electrorepellant metal netting while drawing sick leave.
Every year, the Anxiety Disorders Association of America publishes a research document they call the Stress and Anxiety Disorders Study, which tracks the fears and concerns of the American public. What this report shows is a growing trend of anxiety. Not only do most people think that the world has become a more dangerous place, but "Seven out of every ten adults in the United States now say they experience stress or anxiety daily, and most say it interferes with their lives. About one-third report persistent stress or excessive anxiety daily or that they have had an anxiety or panic attack. Seven out of ten of those adults say they have trouble sleeping."
While terrorism and climate change are big concerns for many, what people worry particularly about are threats to their health, and that of their families. It's got to such a level of anxiety that more and more of us are tipping over the edge and developing full-blown pathological fears or phobias.
The rate of increase has now reached the state where the proportion of American adults diagnosed with clinical anxiety disorders has actually doubled in the space of just two years — from 7 percent in 2005 to between 14 and 18 percent, or 40 million Americans, in 2007.
According to recent international research, the number of people suffering from phobias is rising sharply, and it has now reached the point where one American in every six suffers from at least one phobia. Some 15 million adults, or 6.8 percent of the population, suffer from social phobia, which leads to blushing, sweating, trembling, palpitations, and nausea in certain social situations. A further 19 million people, or 8.7 percent of the population, suffer from at least one other specific phobia. And some have many, many more. It's telling, too, that in an age of health scares, the kinds of phobias that people suffer from are changing. It used to be that the most common ones were the "old favorites," the ones with the Greek names, like claustrophobia (the fear of enclosed spaces), agoraphobia (the fear of open spaces, currently suffered by 1.8 million Americans), or even arachnophobia (the fear of spiders). Now all those old phobias have been overtaken by a whole new set of fears, many of which don't even have names yet — or at least, they don't have names that normal people have heard of. They tend to be health-related, and often have to do with dirt and germs. One phobia that is increasingly prevalent is a powerful fear of lavatories, particularly public ones or private ones that have to be shared with other people. Which probably goes some way toward explaining why so many new houses seem to have so many bathrooms in them. That and the fact that it seems to have become normal for people to take a bath or a shower every single day, and in some cases even more often, rather than, say, whenever you get particularly dirty. But God knows what they do when they really have to go, these people with the toilet phobia: hold it in as long as they can, I suppose, and then scrub their hands with antibacterial soap afterward.
Beside lavatories, people also get very worried about the germs you might find if you touch things in shops and other public places. Because of this, there is a growing market for products like the Healthy Handle, which is, according to its maker's publicity, "doctor-recommended for use on filthy, germ-infested shopping cart handles." It's a sort of extendable plastic sheath that you clip over the handle of supermarket carts to avoid the terrors of having to touch the handle itself. Then, when you've finished with it, you simply unclip it and pop it in its carrying bag — after it's been in contact, on the inside of it at least, with the germs you were presumably trying to avoid by using it. Which seems a bit like a design flaw to me, but what do I know? Alternatively, or additionally, you can carry a pack of Nice'n CLEAN antibacterial wipes, which are specifically recommended for shopping cart handles. And if you have babies or small children who might want to ride in the cart along with the groceries, you can always buy the CartSafari shopping cart cover with Microban, which covers the seat, handle, and sidebars of the cart with antibacterial fabric, to prevent your child touching anything at all unclean.
These things didn't really exist a generation ago, when people were less fussy about dirt. If they had existed, their market would have been limited to a few eccentric recluses like the germ-phobic millionaire Howard Hughes; now, increasingly, they're sold as mainstream products for regular, everyday people.
All of this leads us on to a question: If we're all so anxious, these days, about the possibility that bad things might happen to us, how do we cope with it when, or if, those bad things actually come to pass?
WHY IT'S NEVER YOUR OWN STUPID FAULT
AT AN advertising agency where I used to work, one of the more high-powered account executives slipped, one day, on the stairs coming down from a fifth-floor meeting room and came down several steps rather quicker than she had anticipated, on her backside.
This came as a bit of a surprise to her.
She slipped on those stairs not because she was clumsy, or because she was wearing expensive high-heeled shoes, and certainly not because she was trying to find her wafer-thin cell phone in her oversized patent-leather handbag while not paying enough attention to where she was going, but because of the stairs themselves, which made her fall, on account of being unduly shiny or slippery or something.
She was quite sure of that fact; and if it was also a fact that lots of other people had managed to get down those same stairs on that day in the normal way without any trouble, then that fact was neither here nor there: the fact was that she had fallen. More than this, in falling she had suffered soft tissue damage.
Soft tissue damage might sound like a fancy word for a painful and embarrassing bruise, but it is not the same thing at all. Painful and embarrassing bruises go away by themselves, in the end, but soft tissue damage only goes away through a course of expensive private physiotherapy, the bill for which was duly presented to the managing director some days later.
It's worth knowing this.
I wish I'd known it myself a couple of months before when, at the age of forty-five, I thought it would be a good idea to learn to ride a BMX bike.
There are a lot of things you can do on a BMX bike at my age, besides looking really stupid.
One of the many things you can do on a BMX bike at the age of forty-five, or indeed at any age, is what's known as a manual. A manual is a kind of a wheelie, where you go up on your back wheel. It's called a manual, if you want to know, and not just a wheelie, because instead of pedaling, as in a normal wheelie, you pull the front of the bike up manually, while leaning back and down over the back wheel. So anyway, you do this pulling and leaning until you reach a crucial balance point, riding along on your back wheel, and you shift your weight and touch your back brake to keep yourself in balance. Or at least, that is the theory of it.
What I discovered, in trying to learn this manual thing one lunchtime, is an addition to the theory: what happens if you keep on pulling and leaning back beyond the balance point, while moving fast, and beyond the point at which you can get your feet down on the ground and out of it.
What happens is that you topple over backward. If you topple over backward on a bike with your hands still on the handlebars and your feet still on the pedals, what happens is that you land with all of your weight on your backside, watched by appreciative passersby, and then your bike shoots off without you and smacks into the side of a parked car, denting it on impact and then taking a big gouge out of the paintwork as it skids away. I also discovered that when you try to get up after something like this, it sometimes happens that one of your legs decides it doesn't want to comply, and you find yourself mouthing the same swear word over and over again to yourself out of pain and humiliation as you struggle to your feet and limp over to pick up your bike. You will experience difficulty in walking for some days afterward, I found, and your leg will seize up if you sit still for any length of time, so that to get up again you have to brace your arms against a table or something solid and pull yourself to your feet. After a few days of this, there will appear what you might take, at first glance, to be the most monstrous black bruise you have ever seen. That, at any rate, was what I took it for; but if I had known then what I know now, I would have known that it was not, in fact, what I took it to be. What it was, was soft tissue damage; and soft tissue damage is something for which someone else is always to blame, and for which someone else ought to have paid compensation.
And this, it seems, is another of the great emerging themes of modern life. If it is true that we worry more and more about bad things happening to us, it is also true that when, or if, bad things do happen, we try to avoid responsibility for them whenever possible. We blame others for getting us into the mess we are in, and we expect others to get us out of it, and make everything all right.
Let me give you some other examples of what I mean.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from How to Live Dangerously by Warwick Cairns. Copyright © 2008 Warwick Cairns. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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