I’ve remarked before in another post how back in the day we pretty much lived stress free all day until we got home and watched the news. Then we stressed for a while that evening but then the next day we went back to ignorance and bliss.
Now, thanks to social media, Facebook, Twitter, Amber Alert Cell Phone notifications and Emergency Alerts we are in a constant state of panic! For example, about 16 days ago I received an alert on my cell phone that said:
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| Screen shot of my phone |
That's great! I think these are awesome! It spreads the word...but, I never got another alert letting me know that the parties involved were caught, so I stressed about them all day. I still don't know if they were caught or who was abducted and if they are ok!
Yesterday I received:
Emergency Alert: Dust Storm Warning in this area til 11:00 PM PDT. Avoid travel. Check local media.
People on Facebook were going nuts wondering about this and going back and forth about whether or not they should pick up their kids from school rather than having them walk or ride the bus! Big panic and turns out it wasn't even really in our area!
Then there was this crazy story yesterday about a woman who was home alone with her baby in a nice part of town and three men came to the door at around 9 in the morning. They knocked on the door, she used the peep hole but did not answer. They kicked the door in! She hid upstairs with the baby and while she was hiding she called her husband and the police on her cell phone.
The husband got there before the police and slashed the tires of the get-a-way car and then confronted the suspects when they fled the residence in the car. Because of the slashed tires the car became disabled a few blocks away and they fled on foot.
The police did show up and in an ironic twist to the story one of the suspects had to be taken to a local hospital for treatment of a dog bite by a police service dog!
Here's a link to the complete story.
What was amazing to me about this whole thing was the myriad of comments posted by other facebookers. I wish I could just paste a screen shot, but facebook posts pictures and names, so here are some of the comments.
"Time to go gun shopping ASAP"
"To bad the mother didn't have a firearm and shot all three of them! She could have saved the judicial system a lot of money!"
"I want to know who pays the medical for the fool's dog bite. Please don't tell me it's on the taxpayers dollar. Hope it's his momma who raised him like that."
"This is why every home should have a gun and people should know how to safely and responsibly use one. I take comfort in knowing that if this happened while my wife was home at least one if not all three burglars would be leaving in a body bag!"
"Husband got there before the police? Another reason to own firearms folks, 911 isn't going to do much!"
"Wish the husband was armed and killed all of the burglars including the teenager!!!! Then we would have eliminated the threat of them doing it to anyone else!"
And last but not least...
"To all husbands, if your wife don't know how to use a gun please show her so they can protect themselves while we are away making them money. My wife can load and shoot a gun that's why I don't piss her off anymore, LOL!"
Now, I'm not anti-gun. I don't have one, but I know how to shoot one and I have pretty good aim. My ex-husband even taught me how to take one apart, clean it and put it back together, but I have no desire to have a gun. My point in posting the comments is that the husband disabled the burglars without a gun! He slashed the tires, he out-smarted them. A gun is not always the answer. It's good to have one and to know how to use one, but taking a human life is not something to take lightly. The viciousness of some of the comments surprised me.
I really don't know how anyone in Bakersfield got any work done yesterday since we were all on Facebook reading and making comments on the various tragedies going on yesterday, but it's a Brave New World!
Biologically we are an animal that should live in small groups, fairly isolated from other small groups to prevent food and territory competition. We should eat things that we find in our environment that are natural. When the sun goes down, we should retire, entertain ourselves with loving sex, and we should sleep until the sun come up. Alas we have a rather well evolved brain and that brain has got us into a lot of trouble.
ReplyDeleteFirst, we don't follow our circadian rhythms, with the innovation of fire and later electricity we violate our bodies' need to go to sleep when it gets dark. Second we don't eat right. Agriculture tends to feed us things that will indeed keep us alive but are not very healthful. Third we don't get the proper exercise. Most of us sit in front of some contraption. We know things that we shouldn't know, like mud slides in Washington, missing air craft in the Indian ocean, and amber alerts from Long Beach but we don't know things that we should like the last names of the people who live 2 houses down and the fact they are in pain because their adult daughter is getting a divorce. Then for the price of several days labor, we make available to damned near anyone weapons with the capacity of wiping out every one we should know in several minutes. We spend an average of an hour or so everyday driving a car that we are not really equipped to handle. Our sensory systems are designed to handle short periods of 10 MPH movement. A run, which we seldom do. We may spend an hour at 60 mph. Sixty MPH is 88 feet per second. The transition time of nerve impulses from your eye to your visual cortex is about 200 to 300 milliseconds. So at 60 MPH an event happens in front of you, you have moved 17 to 26 feet toward the problem before your brain is even has the possibility to know that something has occurred, and how many of us drive 60 MPH? Driving a car seems easy as pie, but if you want an idea of how difficult it is, think back to the first time you drove one. It is still that hard and it still extracts a measure of stress on your system. Then we load ourselves up with drugs: caffeine and alcohol and gobs of prescription drugs that the pharmaceutical industrial complex has deemed profitable for you to take. Again these things may keep you alive but they extract a cost to your system. Rather than doing sex we obsess about it, watch it done wrong on the internet, and often do it with the wrong people at the wrong time. Then we surround ourselves with contraptions that bombard us with more information than we can possibly handle. Yes it is horrific that a mud slide has killed a number of people. But what agency do you have over that problem? Other than sending some money, what can you do. And let's presume that you sent your entire year's salary, what good would it do in light of the size of the tragedy?
The type of news that you are equipped to handle, there is a saber tooth tiger moving in on the perimeter, is something that you have agency over. A tsunami wiping out 250,000 people or swamping 6 nuclear reactors is not something you have agency over.
We do all this stuff, yet biologically we should be out in a patch of woods foraging for nuts and berries, thinking about the lovely sex we had last night, and keeping an eye out for that saber tooth.
Great comment as always Sextant, you need to do what I do and copy and paste and make a blog post on you blog about this. Bergman, name of my neighbor two doors down, Gamboa, name of my next door neighbor, husband just died, wife scared to be alone in the house. Gave her a big hug with my condolences yesterday afternoon when she was picking up some things to go stay with her son. That's the compulsive hyperphiliac part of me coming out.
ReplyDeleteBut yes, you are so correct, you got the meaning of my post perfectly. We know things that we don't need to know and we know them ALL DAY LONG! There is no down time from tragedy! The saber tooth tiger is in every Facebook/Twitter post!
As to your talk about driving and the statistics on speeds. I've often remarked to anyone that will listen how amazing I find it to be speeding down the highway at 75 miles per hour right next to others and to big rigs and how we are able to maintain that speeding car in the lane we are in. It is just astounding the human mind, how can a creature so brilliant be so stupid at times?
Thanks for chiming in...always a pleasure and I always learn something!