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Jan. 1st, 2002 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
botiasAnother New Year's Eve gone and I wasn't partying in Sydney or London or... anywhere really. It's really too bad. There was such good feeling the last few years. The optimists had won out over the survivalists and doom and gloomers. Generators were for sale everywhere, health food stores had signs up declaring that bulk food purchases were NOT returnable. The 9/11 thing was just not a good way to start a new century.
It's weird though. You'd think dead would be dead, but it's not. Approx. 40,000 people die in automobile accidents every year. 8 times the number that perished flaming on TV, and no one seems to care overly (even about the flaming ones). They exceed (and whine interminably about) the speed limit, eschew their seat belts, fiddle with their radios, dial their cell phones, drink. People's feelings about mortality are definitely not one of those rational things. Dead is dead, but people only fear dying in odd and noteworthy ways. Shark attack, shooting, etc. No one ever seems in a lather about heart attacks or lung cancer. I guess what Osama really did was mess with Americans' inalienable right to pick their handbasket (and that of the people in the cars proximal to them), and in a most public, and provocative way. So it seems that it's really about pride and posturing, and not those poor people's lives at all.
It's weird though. You'd think dead would be dead, but it's not. Approx. 40,000 people die in automobile accidents every year. 8 times the number that perished flaming on TV, and no one seems to care overly (even about the flaming ones). They exceed (and whine interminably about) the speed limit, eschew their seat belts, fiddle with their radios, dial their cell phones, drink. People's feelings about mortality are definitely not one of those rational things. Dead is dead, but people only fear dying in odd and noteworthy ways. Shark attack, shooting, etc. No one ever seems in a lather about heart attacks or lung cancer. I guess what Osama really did was mess with Americans' inalienable right to pick their handbasket (and that of the people in the cars proximal to them), and in a most public, and provocative way. So it seems that it's really about pride and posturing, and not those poor people's lives at all.
