Diminishing Returns

I know they exist out there—somewhere—I've read articles in the paper where emergency room doctors are quoted saying bike helmets have saved many lives. I'm sure there are even some people reading this article who could tell gruesome tales…but my point is:

They are the rare exception.

But, when the Municipality of Anchorage passed an ordinance mandating bike helmets what was lost? Free choice? Accountability for one's actions? Learning cause and effect? How about the feeling of the wind in your hair? And the irony is that with the loss of these crucial life experiences, the helmets still haven't eliminated the danger. There will still be bicycle fatalities.

But before you think this is all about bike helmets, let me expand a bit. My parents were children of the sixties lived through threats of nuclear holocaust, the Watts riots, riots at the Democratic National Convention, riots at Kent State, heck, riots everywhere, the fear dying in a controversial war, conflicts over civil rights, assassinations—JFK, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy—corruption in government and the resignation of Nixon.

But, they made it through and are well on their way to collecting social security checks.

Now, go back even further when my grandparents married in 1943, days before he shipped off to serve as a medic in World War II. They had lived through the Depression and knew what real poverty looked like, they lived through the trauma of Pearl Harbor, the possible world domination by the Third Reich, the death of friends and loved ones, and biological epidemics such as polio, influenza and countless other diseases. But even amid the turmoil someone was saying, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

Have we reached that point? Are we running around with the televisions blaring fearing nothing of more substance than FEAR itself?

The problems and traumas of previous generations have been, if not irradiated, substantially diminished leaving us with so much leisure time and life expectancy that we have had to find new dangers to occupy our worrying hours. Smallpox, diphtheria, polio these are replaced by the fear of fluoridated water or allergic reactions to vaccines—ironically, those same vaccines that wiped most childhood diseases from our collective memory.