by Reg Green
In an article I was reading this week, the well-known author, Elwyn White, talks about the stress showing in people’s faces because of the obstacles they face in their everyday lives. Some, he adds, are desperate. No doubt you’ve noticed it too.
Here are some of the obstacles he reels off: Oil. Nuclear power plants. Land use and zoning. The plight of the small hospitaL Pollution. Windmills. Food stamps. The price of gas at the pumps.The price of doughnuts in the store. Unemployment. The power of the Federal Government. Tle long shadow of the state. Drug abuse. Breaking and entering. Centralization. Russian trawlers. And so on and on.
It’s enough to make anyone give in. But then again: the author is better known as E.B. White (creator of “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little”) and the article is dated February 8, 1975. Maybe things aren’t so desperate, after all.
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One Response
I won’t go so far as to affirm that public affairs vex no man, but I will own that I neither eat nor sleep less well, or ever have done, on their account. At most, I might sleep less well when I have been irritated by a colleague’s lack of silence and preference for expressing disagreeable views of things at length at work. But it’s the relentless expression, not the subject matter.
I’m 52, and grew up with the public affairs of the late Cold War, and now pass middle age with those of today. Those of today are not as bad as those of that former time, and the earlier ones were not enough to keep me awake or any of my teen compatriots.
On the whole, since the west now has more choice in the matter of whether we get nuked or not, and the Russians are on the Don, not the Elbe or the Rhine, I sleep better than I might have done as an adult in the 80s.
A curious list, White’s- ‘drug abuse’ doesn’t bother me at all. I simply decided not to engage in it.