Most of us live our daily lives in fear. Fear not only of death but of life. Our whole purpose seems to be to avoid pain, suffering and death. We take all kinds of precautions like donning helmets to ride a bicycle, strapping on seat belts when get into the car and the like. Safety and security seems to be the overriding concern today.
As you know, this was not always the case. When I was growing up we kids did things I wouldn't tell my mother about... even today.
We would climb the rocky cliffs at Oswald Park and walk on railroad right of ways and ride our bikes on Rt 9 to Pekin sans the helmets and swim in filthy creeks and play in the neighborhoods without adult supervision and wander home only once the street lights started coming on.
My brother and I used to walk down the sidewalks in our neighborhood on First Street in Morton carrying our BB guns with which we shot mourning doves, robins and rabbits. We even shot ourselves with pellets when playing "Army." And, yes we drank water out of garden hoses, we smoked hollow sticks from neighborhood bushes to simulate all of the chain smoking adults we saw.
I remember smoking swisher sweet cigars when I was 12 or so. How I got my hands on them I do not recall. We ate raw hamburger straight from the bloody package mom purchased from Martin's Supermarket and I do not remember ever getting sick from the now dreaded E. Coli bacteria.
I can remember canoeing down Spoon River near London Mills as a Boy Scout with Troop 85 when I was 11 years old. That day, none of us wore life jackets or were instructed in boat safety. We just got in the stinking canoe and paddled!
I got frost bitten fingers back in 1973 hiking at the Optimist Cabin in the north woods outside Morton with other Boy Scouts when the wind chill was a mind numbing -30 degrees. It was bad enough that the doctor warned my mother that if the medication didn't do it's job I faced certain amputation of the affected extremities. Luckily, the meds worked and I'm using said fingers to pen this article.
Back then mom lathered herself and us with baby oil at the Morton Pool and we swam in that unprotected state for hours in the hot blazing sun and we would walk barefoot all the way from our house downtown to the pool agonizing from the egg- frying heat of the concrete sidewalks. In fact, all of us walked everywhere barefoot during the hot summer months.
Geez, what has happened to us between,1959 the year I was born, and today to explain all of this fear that encapsulates us?
Well, some of it may come from information overload due to the widespread use of the internet. For example, I remember a painful headache coming on once so I googled "headaches are symptomatic of what diseases." Of course, brain tumors came up first. After perusing the hundreds of articles that popped up, I had convinced myself that I was dying of some dread, inoperable brain tumor and probably had only weeks or a few months to live!
Turns out it was just a headache...nothing more. Parents today are told that spanking is child abuse and if the child calls the police they can go to prison.
Over regulation of just about everything in this country is strangling our culture and our lives. We're trying to escape reality.
Parents are so busy today chasing the so-called "American Dream" trying to save up to buy the big mansion, buy the $80,000 BMW and plan for the vacation in the South of France that they feel compelled to over-schedule their children's activities via organized sports, music lessons and the like just to keep the kids busy so they stay out of their parents hair.
We need to conquer our fears especially our fear of life. And, if our fear of death is controlling we will find as Thoreau feared, that on our death bed we discover that we never really lived.
Throw safety and security to the wind and regain your sense of adventure and get out there and live...before you die. Remember, we all are going to die anyway. No one gets out of this alive so, you might as well get going now...and live!
BR Schoenbein
October 4, 2015
