All the things you could possibly worry about in one sitting

What is the deal with everything causing cancer today? Cell phones are said to cause brain cancer in some cases if used often enough. Eating red meat is said to cause cancer. The sun which warms us and enables our crops to grow to provide food for us and keep us alive by warming the earth—gives people cancer. It’s just ludicrous. If it’s not cancer, it’s something else. Salmonella can be got from chickens and now from tomatoes?! Give me a break! Mosquitos can cause our brains to fill with fluid (encephalitis) and can also give us West Nile—I have no idea what that is but I know it’s pretty terrible. It just seems that there is no way we can prevent all these illnesses if the sources surround us like they do. Sure, we can take measures to prevent illness. We can wear sunscreen—but then if we forget to reapply it we can get burned and our skin can get cancer anyway! We can cook our chicken until it’s black and cut tomatoes out of our diets—but then we can eat ground beef infected with Mad Cow or Hoof-in-Mouth Disease that can’t be killed by any amount of cooking! What the hell are we supposed to do? I was reading recently about this other infection, and this one is really bad, let me tell ya. It comes from sweat. Can you believe that? Yes, sweat. A high-school football player came down with this infection after practice one day and a couple days later he was in the hospital on his deathbed! Apparently, swapping sweat with his fellow teammates on the football field had given him this horrible bacterial infection that ate at his insides and made his lungs look like swiss cheese. He lost a prodigious amount of weight and his family came into his room, preparing to say goodbye to him. Thank God the doctors were able to save him, but it was more than a close call. The doctors say now you’ve got to wash your clothes immediately after any physical activity with others to prevent this infection. Sure, most of us do wash our clothes after sweating. I don’t want you to think I think it’s weird to do that. But I do martial arts and before hearing about this, when I would go twice a week to karate class, I wouldn’t always wash my gi (uniform) in between classes. I would go to class on Tuesday and sweat, let it dry and wear it again on Wednesday or Thursday. What would be the point of washing it only to have to wash it again a day or two later? Surviving, that’s the point. Preventing this crazy disease from invading my body and riddling my lungs with holes and killing me in two days. Unbelievable. You can die just from failing to wash your clothes promptly after a martial arts workout or a friendly basketball game. Thankfully, this particular illness is easy to avoid if you remember to be anal about washing your clothes after every workout, which I do now. But lots of other illnesses are not so easy to avoid. Like Mad Cow or Hoof-in-Mouth. What the hell is Mad Cow? Does it make somebody get down on all fours, mooing and grazing psychotically and screaming in pain because one’s imaginary utters are not getting milked, until whatever it is infecting his brain eventually kills him? What in God’s name is Hoof-in-Mouth? Will it make someone sit down and stuff his foot in his mouth, which is probably a great way to get a whole lot of other diseases, like silverfish and whatnot. I mean, who the hell discovered and named these diseases? Where do they come from? What causes them? And it’s not even just food we have to worry about anymore. There’s still the issue of lead paint. What the hell? I thought the lead paint scare was over, like the asbestos one. I thought we didn’t have to worry anymore about kids eating lead paint and winding up mentally retarded, unless they happened to live in a very old house—like I do. I didn’t eat lead paint and thankfully am not retarded, but I digress. The point is, I have a little baby nephew right now, and he’s cute as can be. But now, before we can buy him toys, we have to check the bottom or the back or the whole damn thing to find that little label that hopefully tells us where the hell the damn toy was made and make sure it wasn’t in China. Because CHINA makes toys for kids that contain lead paint. What the hell, China? You're one of the world's leaders in math and science, and your people can’t make toys that aren’t life-threatening to children? Children put toys in their mouths. Children put lots of things in their mouths. Don’t make toys with friggin’ lead paint in them! Is that so much to ask? I mean, we have enough to worry about with friggin’ Mad Cow and Hoof-in-Mouth and cancer and ebola and West Nile and Encephalitis and God-knows-how-many other diseases including that one you get from sweat that eats away at your insides. Do we really need to be worrying about children’s toys? No, we don’t. Then on top of all these diseases we have to worry about, there’s the world around us, which I think we will all agree is in a pretty dangerous state. In the middle east, we’ve got people being bred to hate and kill us for some inexplicable reason that dates back way before George W. Bush was even on America’s radar screen. We can’t even walk into an airport anymore without sweating because of what happened on 9/11 and because of subsequent attempts to repeat the same kind of attacks on other targets, like the attempt in London which was fortunately foiled by their exemplary security system which has something like eight cameras for every ten people. Has our world really come to this? Are we really living in a time when it takes Big Brother watching us do everything from have sex to go to the bathroom just to keep us safe? I remember reading George Orwell’s 1984 and thinking how terrifying it would be if our world really came to that, if Big Brother was watching over us every minute and now I realize that we’re actually not too far off from that after all. The government has such power over us that it’s scary. But we have to ask ourselves what’s scarier: terrorists who would kill us without hesitation and have proven so by doing it, or our own government? I’m going to have to go with terrorists being scarier. At least our own government won’t kill us senselessly. Sure, the meaning of the word privacy has changed, but necessarily so. It’s getting to the point where I would feel better if America adopted the British system and got eight cameras for every ten people in the country, because then I would feel more confident in our ability to defend ourselves from another ghastly and senseless attack. People complain about procedures that invade our privacy, but I say I’d much rather have my privacy invaded than be killed because somebody else’s privacy wasn’t invaded and that somebody else turned out to be a senseless murderer who hated me simply because I live in the United States. Don't get me wrong: this doesn't mean I think America should try to act as the world's police, because clearly that has gotten us into trouble. But we need to safeguard against future attacks like 9/11. I live in small town America, and I used to think I was safe here. Then, several towns over from me, in another small town which is not quite as small but still not that large, a family was savagely murdered. The wife and daughter were raped and killed and the house was set afire. The father was the only survivor of the whole ordeal. Imagine being that father now. That woke me up in the way Capote’s In Cold Blood woke up the generation before me to the dangers of life in small-town America. You don’t have to be in the inner-city or the ghetto to be killed or terrorized or mutilated. It can happen anywhere. We constantly have to be on alert. I used to walk my girlfriend out to her car whenever she would come over and eventually I started saying, it’s only fifty feet to the car from my door. What could possibly happen in my small town over that short distance on a quiet night? Now I don’t ask that question anymore because the possible answers are too terrifying. Instead, I walk her out now, every time, and I look all around me for potential threats to our safety. Especially hers. I’m not paranoid—I’m aware. Obviously, we can’t live our lives in constant fear of being killed by Mad Cow or cancer or friggin’ tomatoes or terrorists or murderers, but we can’t be lulled into a false sense of safety. All I need is one horrifying event like that in small-town U.S.A. to be my wake up call. And thank God it wasn’t my family. Because that poor family didn’t get a wake up call. They got killed. This is one of the reasons I practice martial arts. I want to be ready if and when people like that come for me. I want to be ready for the bastard who invades my home and tries to hurt my wife or family. I'm going to put a hurtin' on him. He'll feel lucky just to be alive afterward, and he will never forget what happened to him the time he tried to hurt my family. I am not a violent person but I can become one if need be. And it makes me feel safer. Unfortunately, I cannot use karate on salmonella, Mad Cow, cancer or any of those diseases, but by staying healthy and in-shape and watching what I eat, I can at least hope to lessen the likelihood of these things happening to me. Go on and live your lives, but don’t take safety and health for granted.