I keep seeing well-wishers telling friends to have a "safe and prosperous" or a "healthy and safe" new year, a year full of love, happiness and safety, and so on and so forth. It seems safety has become a bit more important this year. I don't know if there are more people frightened out of their wits than usual, if those wishing to keep us all that way are working harder than usual, if the world is less safe than usual or maybe I'm just noticing the word "safe" more than ever. Not sure. But let's just see how safe we are, shall we?
Ever just sit down and think of how many times a day you take your life into your hands, or put it in the hands of another person? I mean just get yourself really really bored sometime and start thinking about this. It's uncanny! We trust thousands of total strangers every day with our fragile, little lives! You're saying, "Thousands? Come on, Dave!" I'd be willing to bet that most days it's in the TENS of thousands or even HUNDREDS of thousands. You don't think so? Okay just think of the food we eat. How many deaths were there in 2014 as a result of contaminated food? As usual the stats are hard to come by for most places so we'll have to look at the U.S. As far as I can read on the internet there are 3000 to 9000 deaths a year in the U.S. caused by foodborne illnesses, diseases and contaminations. And if the food is perfectly fine there are 3000 deaths every year just by choking on it.
Think of how many people are directly responsible for the food you ate today. Even if it's something as simple as a piece of fruit, an apple, just imagine how many people have had a perfectly good chance to touch, or contaminate your apple in some way. There's the seed manufacturers and sellers, the planter, the grower, all the people at every stage of production of all the sprays, fertilizers, waxes and whatnot the grower uses during the growing process, there's the people responsible for checking and maintaining the purity of the water used to water the apple tree that grew your apple, the pickers, the handlers, the boxers, the transporters, the wholesalers, the grocers, every customer at the grocery store during the time that piece of fruit was on display, the supermarket clerk, and finally you. You can get into greater detail. There are also the kids in the neighbourhood of the orchard who snuck in on Halloween night and stole apples from the tree your apple grew on. There are the nearby factories that belch contaminants into the sky that get into the clouds that get into the rain that falls into the ground that gets sucked up by the roots of your apple's tree. I mean you can really go crazy and talk about every creature throughout the years that has contributed to the make-up of the soil that your apple's apple tree grew in. If you dwell too deeply on this, you can drive yourself around the bend.
And speaking of driving, think of how many people could kill you every time you go for just a short drive. Not just your fellow motorists who breeze by you going in the opposite direction an arms length or two away at speeds that, when combined with your speed, would obliterate you in a head-on collision if the other driver, or you, should for whatever reason just jerk the steering wheel two inches the wrong way. I'm talking about every worker on every assembly line at every factory that worked on every single part of that car you are driving. Just take one part, I dunno, a lynch pin in the axle let's say. It was manufactured 10 years ago in a small, rural area of Northern China at a factory where people can make better wages than they can farming so long as they work more than the 12-hour days they are contracted for. Imagine one day a sleepy, 12-year-old who had just finished three 18-hour shifts in a row and was in a state of fatigue in which motor skills were deteriorating was working the lynch pin sealant line in the factory. This is a conveyor belt with metal lynch pins on it and workers with hoses spraying anti-oxidant coating on the lynch pins. Cheaper than making them with rust proof material! Well Wang Chung, just one of the 100,000 people you are trusting today, that 12-year-old boy who is now 22 and attending college with all the money he saved from his job at the lynch pin factory, (yeah right!), nodded off for a minute and didn't spray 10 or 15 lynch pins. One of those lynch pins is holding the left front wheel onto your Toyota Carolla. It's been rusting for ten years and at this very moment it snaps and your left front wheel comes off your Carolla and you lose control hurtling off a hundred-foot cliff and into a colony of fire ants on the ground below. All because you unknowingly trusted Wang Chung 10 years ago to stay awake on the lynch pin sealant line.
Now just imagine how many hundreds, or maybe thousands of those very same scenarios happen to us every single day! I swear germaphobes have it the worst! But if you really sat down and thought about things you'd realize that there is absolutely no way of avoiding exposing ourselved to a bazillion germs every day. We try to wash, or sanitize our hands as often as we can but after a few million million million microbes, who's counting really? Microbes, folks. They've been around since the days when the oceans routinely boiled and they represent all the deadly viruses, plagues, bacteria and fungi of many millennea. There are more microbes on your hand right now than there are people on the earth. I don't care how recently you used your hand sanitizer. You might put toilet paper on the seat before you use a public toilet but then you flush using the same handle or button that everybody all day has used then open the door twisting the same lock they twisted unlocked then turn on the same tap that they did then crank the same towel dispenser crank and exit using the door knob that they all used on the door to the washroom. All this time mixing microbes. You use the same buttons on the bank machine as 100 other people with millions of different microbes each. You hold the same handle on the bus as 50 different people. You can try to avoid touching what other people have touched but then you will open a door and it's like shaking hands with dozens of people and a whole history worth of microbes! Phones, shopping cart handles, lightswitches, computers, tables, and then we touch our faces and self-administer all those germs. It's estimated that we touch our faces once every three minutes and that 80% of infectious diseases are transmitted by touch.
Every time you walk on a sidewalk there could be a 100-foot drop below and you are trusting the sidewalk to be thick enough to sustain your weight. Forget about that, we are just trusting that we won't trip and fall. (6000 deaths a year) We speed through intersections even though faulty traffic lights are responsible for thousands of deaths a year. (2000 in the U.S. alone) Elevator cables sometimes break. (30 deaths and 17,000 injured every year in the U.S.) How often are you in elevators? We go outside even though we know we'll get a mosquito bite or two. (800,000 deaths a year by mosquito) Tonight there will be a lot of champagne drunk even though every year 24 people are killed by champagne corks! I'm not making that up! Even the buildings you go in and out of every day. Are they safe? One of my friends here in Jakarta had the roof of her office collapse from the weight of rain on it. Apparently that happens a lot in the rainy season here. Roads cave in. Sinkholes. Disappearing planes. Crashes, earthquakes, tsunamis, Ebola, ISIS, wild animal attacks... it's no wonder people are getting so preoccupied with safety!
Or maybe it's not really that kind of safety people are worried about. There are so many other examples of false safety we have! Ever seen a handcuff key? It's a little metal shaft with a bump on it. Every set of handcuffs known to man has the same key. Duplication is a cinch. Yet you could have Ted Bundy in a room full of female college co-eds wrestling in Barbecue sauce and if he was cuffed, "No danger there. He won't rape, kill or eat anyone because he has these infallable safety restraints around his wrists!" When I was a security guard I had a couple handcuff keys on me at all times. I'm sure a lot of guards do. Just one example in a world choc - o - block full of false security.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the growing world, (and shrinking safety), of technology. I'm not going to ask how many people HAVE had a bank account hacked into or an incident of credit card fraud. How many people HAVEN'T? How hard do banks and credit card companies try to keep THIS fact a mystery? With the recent Sony hack, how safe does THAT make you feel???
But you know, there are simple solutions to all of these problems. Interac, cashless environments on flights or in hotels, mandatory credit card imprint or number for registration, and other such things are trying to force us all into the unsafe world of credit but I can't remember the last time I heard a story about a house being broken into and a person's saving being stolen from their house safe. Or from their mattress for that matter. I admit there are a few conveniences to credit. I have been travelling, run out of cash and been unable to get any more from the bank machine. I really wanted a credit card then. But had I known a country could just shut down its bank machines, I would have brought more cash. Philippines...
I'm here to tell you that I touch my face FAR more often than once every three minutes and I don't wash my hands all that often. I shake people's hands, high five, use public toilets without my hasmat suit, judge leftovers by smelling them, employ the five second rule for dropped food, I live dangerously! Ironicallly this might be the safest way to do things. I just never get sick any more. A cold here and there but that's it. I think it's got a lot to do with not sweating the small stuff. Can't get much smaller than a microbe. But it also has a lot to do with living a reasonably healthy life. I exercise and eat my fruits and veggies. I fight sickness with strong biological immunity not drugs. I am reasonable, not paranoid, in my cleanliness.
As for bank and internet security, they're not secure. I understand that. So I try to use banks as little as possible and I try not to do anything that I might have to keep a secret. Simple.
When you think about it the world is a dangerous place, our lives are tennuous gifts that are in moment to moment peril no matter what we try to do to change that and EEERRR verybody is living dangerously. Coconuts fall on the heads of a lot of people every year. 150 people die from kepala to the kelapa (coconut to the head). Lightning kills 24,000 people every year. So sleep well knowing all of these dangers, my beloved readers, (450 people a year die from falling out of bed). 20 people in the U.S. alone die every year from COW attacks! That's no bull! Cow! Somehow 100 people a year die from hot tap water! How does that even work??? I guess there are a lot of deaths every year from just being stupid. When you know something is dangerous, it's probably best to avoid it. It is astounding how many people just can't obey this advice! In fact they are somehow driven to the opposite! For them there is no help but eternal peace, but for most of us, all we need to do is be reasonably careful.
So anyways, I don't want to wish you a safe new year. It sounds just a bit paranoid to me. All I want to say from the bottom of my heart to all my readers is just take care of yourselves, don't be stupid and try not to do anything you have to keep secret.
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