Scenario 1: A drunken drug dealer (say that 10 times fast) breaks
into the wrong house, shoots a single mother and her three children with a
Saturday night special. Shocked by this vicious crime the city council heads up
a campaign to get people to trade in or sell all their handguns.
Scenario 2: A hundred-year-old brick building in a
California coastal town collapses during an earthquake. The family gets out
safely, but their dog dies in a rain of falling bricks. This event sparks 42
new housing restrictions.
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| purplewallpaper.info |
Scenario 3: The state bird, the purple-legged honey-sucker, starts
dying off so the state sets up strict regulations, which disallow the use of
the insecticides used to protect the state’s all-important cabbage crop.
OK – these are all fictional, but the stories must sound
familiar: a problem arises – a shocking, emotional yank that scares us silly.
We react in a natural way – “Mommy make it stop hurting!” The truth is that
Mommy never did have much control over life’s nastiness, but we believed in her
and her reassurances made us feel so much better.
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| windsun.com |
When my children were little, we lived in Nebraska where
giant, dramatic, fabulous thunderstorms frequently lit up the night sky.
Lightning would suddenly brighten the world and then thunder would shake the
house and the kids would cry. I’d run upstairs to their rooms and hug them down
out of their fear, but before I went back to bed I’d put little wads of toilet
paper in their ears. We all knew that smidgen of tissue was not going to do
anything to block the next thunderclap, but the fact that I’d gone through that
ritual warded off the terror and they’d go back to sleep. It was a lovely
illusion.
