She is a Mean Old Thing

I did a short Mancow spot this morning, and I was thrilled to get it. I will make Eat What You Want and Die Like a Man - The World's Unhealthiest Cookbook famous if it kills me.

Right now, I'm taking a break. I always need to wind down after a radio bit. Somehow, I ended up Googling typhus and typhoid. Evidently, the British used to confine carriers in mental asylums, and some were not released until about sixteen years ago. You would think these miserable people would have been freed once antibiotics were available, but not all of them were. And some went crazy from confinement, assuring they would never be released.

We are so spoiled now. So lucky. For millennia, the world's population increased slowly, and then in recent centuries, it took off. Why? Because life is so easy now, compared to the old days. Technology has given us so much protection.

I once read a book on the black plague. I had always assumed the plague was a one-time thing, but boy, was I wrong. Once plague epidemics began in Europe, they came back over and over. You probably know that the disease was carried by fleas, but it was also possible to contract it by being near a person who coughed or sneezed. Then you died in misery, and you stood a good chance of infecting your loved ones in the process.

And we worry about gas-price spikes.

Typhoid bore similarities to the plague. Some believe the "plague" Thucydides wrote about was typhoid, and some believe it was typhus. You can spread typhoid by failing to wash your hands after you use the toilet, which means about 75% of American men are potential carriers. Typhus is no fun, either, and it's spread by lice. Before the modern age, there was no way to fight lice, and even in the 20th century, lice managed to infect many, many people.

People used to die from the flu, by the millions. And the bird flu scare reminded us that it can happen again. Now that I think about it, millions of people have died from malaria, which is preventable, because we haven't used DDT responsibly. It's funny; the hippies call the earth--an inanimate object--"Gaia," and they claim it's our mother, and that it wants to take care of us. The truth is that the earth has been working hard to kill us since the dawn of time, and it succeeds in numbers that would make Hitler and Stalin and Mao weep with admiration. Does your mother want you dead? Mine never did. I'd like to hear Gaia's loving explanation for Katrina or the Dust Bowl or locusts or cretinism. And how about radon? The earth doesn't love us, and it doesn't take care of us. The earth is our enemy, and we continue to exist because we made it our slave. We survive because we fight the earth every day.

It's funny; we see ourselves as precious and important, but in the past, we were downright ephemeral. Life was unbelievably perilous.

These days, if you avoid heart attacks, car wrecks, and cancer, you can pretty much expect to reach 80. At least, that has been true for the generations which reached that age in recent decades. It may not be true of the current generation; there may be a problem ahead of us which will change the picture.

We feel entitled to grow old. How strange that would have seemed to a person living in the nineteenth century.

I have to wonder if our illusion of invulnerability contributes to our immorality. If you're 35 and you've never been to a funeral, maybe it's only natural that you would ignore God and do whatever you want. Adversity changes people's attitudes. They say that during the plague epidemics, people would throw their jewelry and money over monastery walls, to bribe God. And the monks threw it back, fearing it carried disease.

One of life's great challenges is to maintain faith, gratitude, and obedience, in times when life is easy. There is a perpetual cycle. Faith and obedience beget prosperity, prosperity begets pride, pride begets sin, and sin begets misfortune. Which begets faith and obedience.

I wish I hadn't started Googling! Sometimes a break can take more out of you than work.