The Left loves a good scare. Global warming is just the latest attempt to get us all to lose control of our bodily functions out of fear of some calamity. In all the scares of my lifetime, I prayed for safety and health of myself and loved ones, and just went about my business. Andrew Bolt pretty much did the same thing:
My real problem is simply that in my 48 years I’ve lived through so many pack-panic attacks over nothing that I won’t fall so easily for the next. … Ask if they remember scares like the nuclear winter, DDT, mega-famines, global cooling, acid rain, Repetitive Strain Injury, bird flu, the millennium bug, SARS, toxic PVC, poisonous breast implants, the end of oil, death by fluoride, the Chernobyl doom, the BSE beef that would eat your brains, and other oldies and mouldies.
I’m a lot older than Mr. Bolt, so I can with confidence say I’ve been through hairier times. When I was a young kid they didn’t have a polio vaccine yet. I had friends who spent time in iron lungs and they used to close the swimming pools in the summer.
When I was a kid the Cold War was really cold, not just tepid. I lived on Army bases that would get the first strikes. We watched Sputnik go up and said, well, we gotta do better.
I was living in Germany the day The Wall went up in 1961 and we didn’t know if WWIII would start at the East German border checkpoint the next day as the Army convoy headed toward Berlin. We expected we’d have to evacuate, but until the siren sounded we figured we’d just go along as if things were normal.
My dad was sent to Key West during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We’d watched JFK on TV the night before and many of our dads were deployed 90 miles from Cuba. We joked on our school bus that we might not live out the day, and then we went to class.
Nobody panicked. Nobody got depressed. We dealt. It’s a lost skill.
