hildeguardog's Diaryland
Diary
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What more can I say?
Recently, everything has been as confusing as it ever has. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a theocracy. From school systems to federal holidays, what plays a prominent role in American society and doesn't have roots leading back to Christianity?
I've got a few things bouncing around my mind. First of all, the cost of a pack of cigarettes will soon go up twenty more cents in Cook County. I heard that about a week ago, and then today I learned that each pack will go up another dollar on top of that. $7.50 for one pack of twenty cigarettes? Back in my dad's early smoking days, a pack was about thirty-five cents, and a carton was about $2.80. Also, smoking in restaurants will not be tolerated come mid-January.
People have been smoking tobacco for 3,000 years, why discourage it now? How can a once socially-acceptable custom such as smoking, which predates the existence of Jesus Christ, be under such attacks?
Over the past couple of years, healthy living has become the way to go. I can't go one day without hearing of new ways to keep my weight down. A prime example of the point I'm trying to prove is Cheerios: I can keep my cholesterol lower than hell if I decide that I want the taste of milky cardboard in my mouth all morning.
So say I give up all the little pleasures that get me through each day, like smoking and eating sugar cereals and drinking Pepsi from the bottle, then what? Then maybe my new healthy diet would cure me of any mood-swinging, and maybe my eating and sleeping patterns would become more structured, and then maybe I'd live to be 100 years old with a constant reminder of how drab the world can be.
"Who lives longer? the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'til 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time."(Aldous Huxley)
This takes me back to my earlier ramblings about time, in which I concluded that it's merely a measurement that people tend to blow out of proportion and base their lives on.
This may just be my own skewed perception, but I've never cared to see a difference between a man's life that was cut off after 90 years, and one whose life ended after 75 years. How-- or even who-- am I to judge the respective lives of these two examples? Is Gerald Ford considered a better man than John F. Kennedy because the former outlived the latter? Does my mom love her mother more for living longer than her father? Furthermore, are the elderly more productive than those in their prime(the answer to this question is no; it isn't often that a human reaches their prime while in their 70s or 80s or 90s... furthermore, the word 'prime' implies more strength and efficiency than the word 'elderly.')?
Are people so worried about their life expectancy that they'd sacrifice their personal quality of life?
The only other explanation I can come up with for this health craze is fear-based. How many kinds of cancer have you heard of? Can you count that number within the amount of fingers you have?
I've heard that I am just as susceptible as anybody else to half the diseases, types of cancer, and other-- often seemingly preventable-- serious ailments. Am I expected to take precautions for every single one? What if the one I didn't worry about is the one that gets me? I would figure that I had wasted lots of time for nothing.
12:45 a.m. - Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2005
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
previous - next
|
|
|
|
|
|