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Jacquie Brasher
For example, we apparently worry too much about bird flu and mad cow disease (when there have been no documented cases in the U.S.), but then ignore seat belt warnings and eat food packed with fat and cholesterol. All the wrong things, see? Thing is, it's probably easier to worry about the far-reaching stuff because then we don't have to deal with the real life stuff, right? It could be some form of warped self-preservation. Take for instance this weekend, when I read an article about a petite, under-100 pounds Florida woman who was found dead behind a bookcase in her house. Her family had been looking for her for 11 days! They thought she had been abducted. And all the time, she was dead behind a 6-foot tall bookcase after falling headfirst behind it. The article said she was reaching behind this solid bookcase to adjust a TV plug, fell, and was wedged in and died from lack of oxygen. How awful is that? I know, logically, this was a freak accident, but I'll bet it makes people worry about falling behind bookcases now. I certainly thought about it more than I should, just because of the sheer horror of it all. Chances of me falling behind a bookcase and dying? Zero. I'd probably knock the thing over and break it first. But, here's yet another bizarre way to die and more for us to worry about. The article also mentions that, "We also dread catastrophic risks, those that cause the deaths of a lot of people in a single stroke, as opposed to those that kill in a chronic, distributed way." The article points out that this is the reason why many are afraid to fly when, statistically, it's much more dangerous to drive a car. Apparently, the "dread factor" in most things is what causes people to fear the illogical. When we dread something, we make that thing a lot worse than it actually is. Anxiety is not a good thing and should be avoided at all times. Like many people, I sometimes have the irrational notion that if I "think" of something dreadful, then it won't actually happen. It's the superstitious part of human beings that we can't let go. People want to feel that they are in control of their surroundings, whether they are or not. And, face it, most times "control" is a figment of our imagination. Anyway, I shall try not to worry about silly things like getting hit by meteors, or getting strangled to death by my scarf becoming entangled by the wheels of a moving car. By the way, a famous dancer in the 1920s named Isadora Duncan actually died that way. The scarf thing, I mean, not the meteor. Another freak accident, but I'm not worried. Still, I'll never look at a big bookcase the same way again.--Jacquie Brasher is senior staff writer of The Forest- Blade and can be reached at jacquie@forest-blade.com
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