Lynn Ruth Miller on dealing (or not) with disaster

Oh my god!

I t is always something… and that something terrorises us. In Britain, we are all petrified of spiders, and the strongest among us get queasy when we look down from a high place.

If we are planning suicide, we much prefer to hang ourselves or swallow poison: it isn’t as scary.

All of us can feel our blood pressure rise when we hear what is happening to the ozone layer, even though not one of us has ever seen it or really knows what it is.

We were warned that greater exposure to ultra violet rays has caused a rise in melanomas to eat away our skin, even as it blinds innocent fish and little bunnies. Every educated person worries that our deserts are expanding and we are going to dry out, if we are not completely cooked by global warming or drowned by the melting glaciers first. Worse, the air has become so polluted that if anyone dares to take a deep breath these days, he will die. Now it’s the Ebola virus that is seeping in from Africa and will kill every one of us within moments. What next?!

‘I believed my mother was the cause of all my cavities…’

I have lived through it all, and I can testify that all of it is smoke and mirrors. My mother believed that the Russians created the Asian Flu epidemic, and I believed she was the cause of all my cavities. My sister blamed my mother for making her so fat, and my mother blamed my father when the car stalled.

All of us are afraid that we won’t have enough money to take care of ourselves until we die, and now that we all live longer, we are stashing funds into retirement accounts, under mattresses and behind the furnace just in case we have the bad luck to live to be 110.

The truth is that all the fuss about organic foods is spoiling dinner. I am sorry if the beef I eat was taken from viciously murdered cows, and I feel terrible for the spinach soaked in nasty insecticides so it wouldn’t look like green Swiss cheese when it arrived at the table. If am going to worry that the vegetables in my salad had an unhappy childhood or the cream I rub on my face is nothing but wax, I am not going to have time to go dancing.

Hooray for caring about our environment. Hooray for doing our best to clean up the air and return to real food instead of the genetically modified, tasteless fakes the supermarkets give us. Hooray, too, for medical advances that protect us from epidemics. I believe in doing our best to do our best for ourselves now… and dealing with disaster when it happens. If the coward dies 1,000 deaths and the hero dies but one, I want to be a hero.

“Only when we are no longer afraidDo we begin to live.”

– Dorothy Thompson