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Daily living has become hazardous to our health

Far away and long ago, back when I was a kid, life was a lot more dangerous. We lived in imminent danger at all times because we ate red meat, sprayed with DDT, climbed on unsafe ladders, sat too close to the television and bathed in the sun. How we were even conceived is a mystery, because many of our mothers smoked and drank more than two cups of caffeinated coffee per day.

We went looking for trouble in our convertibles with the tops down, wearing no seatbelts, with the only air bag being the driver. We didn’t read safety warnings, wear helmets or seat belts or have OSHA to protect us. There were far fewer orange safety cones and our medicine bottles weren’t rendered impossible to open with child safety caps. We didn’t do a risk/reward analysis before we left the house every day.

Against all odds, we ate bacon and beef – and lived to tell about it. For breakfast, we put sugar on our Sugar Pops, Frosted Flakes and Sugar Crisp. If we still didn’t get enough sugar in our diets, we’d supplement it with Milk Duds, Twinkies and Hershey’s Kisses. Now doctors tell us all that sugar we ate as kids will kill us, and I’m sure someday, it may.

My generation ushered in the fast food generation; we were practically weaned on Pizza Hut, Burger King, Wendy’s, McDonald’s and yet, we somehow survived. It’s a miracle, really; if we had known then what we know now about the dangers of fast food, I’m sure more of us would have perished long ago.

Adults won’t admit it, but in the 1950s cigarettes were advertised as aids to calm nerves and digestion. “More doctors smoked Camels than any other brand,” bragged a popular ad. In another, a lady begged a man “to blow a little smoke her way.” L and M Cigarettes advertised that they were “just what the doctor ordered.”
This may cause some teenagers to give up the sport, but skateboarding was first popularized when I was a kid. Only, we didn’t have any safety devices like kneepads, helmets or fancy skateboards. Instead, we took roller skates apart and screwed the wheels on a plank of plywood and went careening down hills – and lived to tell about it.

I remember sniffing glue for hours as we put models of cars, airplanes and submarines together, and yet, I don’t think my brain is addled. I played Little League for years without any protective devices and I still speak in the proper octave.

One of my first jobs was spraying weeds in a citrus orchard. We’d pour the chemical into the tank without wearing masks and spray all day. How I survived, I’ll never know. People who could afford a power mower pushed their luck by not having an automatic shutoff on it. Nor did their chainsaws have anti-kickback devices. Yet, most of us have use of all 20 of our digits.

I was given a chemistry set one Christmas that contained jars of all sorts of acid and the only casualty was the expensive surface of my mom’s dining room table. Against all odds, and in a world fraught with danger, most of us made it. Maybe we should be called the “Luckiest Generation” because, in many ways, we were.

As children, we huddled under desks during drills in case the Russians nuked us. Forty percent of us truly believed we’d perish in a global nuclear disaster. Some people dug up their yards and installed bomb shelters. Our government detonated more than 1,000 nuclear devices, including 300 of them above the ground. People used to take their lawn chairs out into the Nevada desert to watch the mushroom cloud.

And yet, not only did we survive, we flourished.
The year I was born (1951), the average life expectancy was 68.2 years. If I hold up my end of the bargain as a male, I can expect to live past 72 years. Despite all the unsafe things we did, we are somehow living longer.

Still, scientists and bureaucrats are trying to get rid of everything that is dangerous so that someday we may all live to be 140 – drooling in some warehouse for the aged where there will probably be a sign warning us not to run or skateboard in the halls.

Readers with questions or comments for Lee Pitts may write to him in care of this publication.

3/19/2008