And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, Editor Emeritus

... that there are lots of disadvantages to getting old (lots of them!) but there are some advantages as well.
For one thing, it seems that whatever is going on is something similar to what we have been through before, maybe a couple or a few times. The current Ebola scare, for example.
It’s not that we should not be concerned, but rather experience shows we may not be doing the prudent things.
I grew up with relatives who were all too familiar with the 1918 flu pandemic, when they lost family members to the disease. It was only the flu? Well, before it was over, one-third of the world’s population caught it. One in three. Close to 100 million died. Ironically, many thought the disease spread from America to Europe when U.S. military personnel went there. Like Ebola from Africa to the rest of the world?
Then in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was polio, misnamed infantile paralysis, that scared us. Philip Roth, prolific author of major novels, has a little book about that period, titled Nemesis. I read it last spring, and was reminded of the many “don’ts” we heard as children. Don’t go where there are large groups. Don’t go to places that are air conditioned. Stay away from outdoor pets. Don’t go to swimming pools. Don’t use public restrooms or drinking fountains. The list was endless. We were treated to newsreel shots of patients in iron lungs. We were reminded that President Roosevelt suffered its effects. Finally, there was a vaccine, or maybe two, one oral and one on a sugar cube.
Before that, my best friend came down with scarlet fever, and he and his family were quarantined. But there was a line of maple trees between our two properties, and we would meet with him on one side of a tree and me on the other. Okay outdoors?
Kids grew up getting mumps, measles and chicken pox, and got the infamous scratch on the upper arm for small pox. We carried that scar for life. In the summer time, it really showed, because the scar tissue didn’t tan.
The first death from AIDS that I became aware of was that of a nun who worked in San Francisco. She received a tainted blood donation in a hospital there, in the city which was the Mecca for male homosexuals. Not, it turns out, the only source of the disease.
When I was in the Navy, there was an outbreak of Asian flu here, but I was in Asia where they called it the American flu!
I heard this morning that a city in one of the Carolinas had declared a “red alert” for air pollution. Investigation showed the cause was a single stink bug which had released its odor too close to an air monitor!
The moral of all of the above is that sometimes we seem to act precipitously and well before all of the facts are known. Sometimes, we learn the facts. And sometimes, we never do, but the crisis passes just the same.
Was it necessary to take all those childhood precautions against polio? Probably not. Was it wise to try that at the time? Probably.
Because they didn’t hurt us.
But what we don’t know can hurt us.