We're all supposed to be dead by now - The Washington Times: Pruden on Politics: " Here's what my Internet correspondent reminded me of (and if you see it on the Internet, it must be so):
'According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s probably shouldn't have survived. Our mothers put us in cribs covered with bright-colored lead-based paint.
'There were no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets, and when we rode our bicycles into traffic (bike paths were unheard of), we had no helmets. If we didn't feel like pumping a bike up the hills, we could always hitch a ride with strangers. There were no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was particularly special.
'We drank water from an old garden hose, not from a bottle. One bottle of bellywash could be shared with up to four friends, drinking from the bottle, and no one died.
'We gorged on cakes, pies, candy, bread and butter, and anything we could find with lots of sugar in and on it, and we were never overweight because we were always running through the 'hood. "

I can add that I have lived through the frights over nuclear holocaust with backyard bomb shelters [a must item in the 60's], fears over the coming ice age cause by global cooling, the Red Scare focusing on Ike who was a conscious member of the communist conspiracy according to Robert Welch, the dread of a silent spring where no birds would sing because they would all be dead by pollutants in the air and water, overpopulation so that there would be no room for us to stand on this cold and polluted and starving planet, global warming evidenced by snowstorms and hurricanes so that we would all fry, and worry about lesser matters like meteor or planetoid crashes into the earth or the sun burning out or exploding. Guns were an especially evil and needed to be confiscated--or at least licensed and tightly controlled before they ganged up on humans and spread death and misery everywhere. But the scares sold newspapers, magazines, and provided jobs for people who couldn't find anything useful to do except scare people. The scare-mongers wanted a monopoly on the scare business so they warned about preachers who spoke of divine judgment and hell fire. The scare-mongers only feared personal hells, not collective ones. In the churches the trouble was with the organs and long sermons---these were replaced by guitars and women giving "devotionals." After all, doctrine divides good human beings and brings war and hatred. Let's see who can show the most love by believing as little as possible.

After all, the world is a stinking place, and the only way to postpone the Horror, the Horror, is to catch a little love somewhere and to have someone who is easy on the mind. It wouldn't matter where you found the love, because true love will be willing to let the bird go, so you can have her if you can catch her. The greatest fear of all is to entangle your life with "commitments" for they just drag you down and get in the way of what you might want to do. How can I be true to myself if I constantly make commitments to others? A person did not fear the disgrace if he was a liar, an adulterer, a sodomite, or a prolific producer of bastard children. The f- word gained respectability, but if a person used the n- word you were dead, which you also were if you called a football player a little monkey, a term used by Howard Cosell, a term which he also used with respect to his grandchildren. The greatest fear was not to conform to the prevailing standards of non-conformity and social correctness, which imposed a societal strait-jacket worse than all the landed gentry of Europe in the last five centuries.

The only thing we had to fear was fear itself, and there were a great many people who made careers by junk science and phony "studies," financed by government, to make us afraid of things we had never thought of before. We wouldn't listen to our mothers who tried to make us put our galoshes on, but we meekly surrendered to seat belts and other meddling from the Nanny State. See my article on the Nanny Church in the Nanny State.

Yep, it's a wonder any of us is alive. Some of us aren't. I remember a boy I went to school with who burned himself up about 50 years ago while stealing gasoline from a farm vehicle. Another boy drank himself to death. They didn't listen to their mothers or fathers, but that generation seemed to surrender without a struggle to the Nanny State, buying into the propaganda that bureaucrats know what is best. They hated their mothers and fathers and surrendered liberty without a peep to governments. After all, they were an enlightened bunch who were assured that they were the first to walk the earth who knew what was wrong with the world and that they would fix it up to be safe for everyone, especially for those who didn't seem to care much about the Ten Commandments.

Solomon said it best, Proverbs 12:10 "A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel." A good man will be recognized even by the animals he owns, but the tender mercies of the ungodly unhinge everyone around them. If we have many more tender mercies from this crowd who are experts on what we are to be afraid of, none of us will survive. Let us follow the example of Nehemiah and "chase them from us." Nehemiah 13:28

Don't despise small things. That butterfly flapping its wings in Moldavia might very well cause a hurricane in Miami. I, for one, will keep my wings flapping as long as I can.