I got to pondering the other night about all the anthrax hysteria and it occurred to me that I, and a lot of you, have been through this many times before:

Polio … it was everywhere when I was a kid and it wasn’t coming from terrorists, it was coming from (gasp!) God. I remember thinking how awful it would be to spend the rest of my life flat on my back in an iron lung with only a mirror placed at an angle above my face to allow me to see beyond my head. Terrifying!. I personally knew a few people who got polio, but fortunately not severely enough to be in an iron lung.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor everyone thought the Japanese were going to come back and capture the Hawaiian Islands. They didn’t. Those in charge of protecting the innocent built wonderful bomb shelters which would have destroyed the occupants if a bomb had hit anywhere in the vicinity. Six foot deep rectangles dug in the ground with absolutely no shoring on the sides and a ceiling of corrugated steel with about 6" of dirt piled on top. Wow! But they helped overcome the fear. Ignorance is bliss.

Next came the atom bomb, and my thinking then was," Geez, it can wipe out a whole city BLOCK!" That was just too awful to contemplate. Bomb shelters were built for the bombs that never came, while we advanced to Hydrogen bombs from which there was no hiding, but useless shelters proliferated. They helped us cope until the fear subsided.

Hey, you Baby Boomers remember the Swine Flu that was going to wipe us all out? Everyone in the country lined up for vaccinations, but I don't think a single case ever materialized in the U.S. The fear certainly did, though.

The "terrorist" was born and strange events started taking place in unexpected places. Cruise ships were hijacked, planes were hijacked, planes started exploding in midair, but we went on living our lives until September 11, 2001 when suddenly everything culminated. Huge buildings were brought down by hijacked commercial airliners, thousands of people lost in the rubble, fear reached such a pitch no one would fly and the airlines (and the economy) were going down the tubes fast, although both are now edging back to normal.

Now the little envelopes of anthrax are arriving all over the East Coast. This seems too insipid for an Osama bin Laden operation. People who don’t need the antibiotic Cipro are taking it 'just to be safe' … ridiculous, and when they need it there won’t be enough to go around. What is coming next? Will the terrorists resurrect Smallpox and plague? Who knows … people of years gone by survived those epidemics, and they didn't even have medicines to cure or prevent them.

I was feeling very depressed thinking about all the kids having to grow up in this 'forever changed world' with such uncertainty facing them … but haven't we all done just that? I can’t foretell the future, but I prefer to think it will all turn out OK again. There will always be challenges, there will always be those who panic, and there will always be solutions followed by new challenges. TV and the news media will go on magnifying the problems as we relive them over and over in beautiful live action TV replays ... which makes them seem much worse because it keeps them forever in our faces. The kids still feel they are invincible to everything.

I don’t know how much life I have left to live, but I’m not going to live it worrying about things that ’might’ happen to me and mine. You can’t hide from earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, blizzards, floods or other acts of nature or even cancer, heart attacks, or car accidents, but they’re out there waiting to happen and have claimed millions of ‘innocent civilian lives' over the years. Life goes on. Of one thing I am certain … I will die someday and so will everyone I know… inevitably and in random order, with or without the help of terrorists.

"The sky is falling", cried Chicken Little …and instant panic landed. A fairy tale?

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copyright© 2001 BZ Leonard All rights reserved
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