by Reena Kapoor
Election time is always a time to make even me wonder about the prospects of this mighty country. However recently I've found myself debating a number of people who bemoan how terrible life in these United States is. It's an old trick to hold America up to the perfection standard and while this country has many faults it's yet to be displaced as the best country in the world (Michelle Obama are you listening?). One trend that's really caught on is that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary it's considered fashionable to whine about how polluted our air, water, food are, how unhealthy our lives, and how we are all at risk for all sorts of diseases, as nauseum.
I found myself in a similar argument recently with a lawyer (it struck me later that she probably makes a living convincing juries how we've been poisoned, diseased, cheated by one an all) and I asked her these simple questions:
- How do you take a nation of people who have among the most prosperous lives, best chances for survival when diagnosed with deadly diseases AND live among the longest lives in the world with among the cleanest air and water not only in the world but in human history and convince them that they should be scared, really scared of just about everything?
- How do you convince them that their food, water, air, and even children's toys are simply deadly, with scant evidence?
- How do you do this such that the populace starts behaving in ways that are indistinguishable from those driven by primitive superstitious belief (more on that later but make this comparison for yourself and see if my analogy holds)?
Ironically, a few days later the following chart from the CDC was published in the news:
Any ideas?
