That thing you thought would save you, is killing you.
The margarine you ate for all of the 1980’s was worse for you than real butter and still clogs your arteries. The marathon training that made you feel so healthy turns out to have ruined your joints and reduced your immunity. The diet that they said would turn around your health messed up your metabolism for good. The drug therapy that you thought would make your life better now turns out to raise your risk of heart attack.
The time-saving devices that our forefathers developed to save their backs now mean that we don’t get any exercise.
Remember the prediction that personal computers would give us a paperless society?
The international alliances of a generation ago come back to bite us, and the children of those allies are now dreaming of jihad against us.
We live in a time with so much information and so little reason to trust anything we read. We can get practically anything we want from anywhere in the world, but half the time we don’t know anything about how it was made or whether it is safe.
And even our best intentions can come back to bite us.
A few months ago my husband and son were in a car accident one block from his nursery school. They slammed into the side of a moving truck at an uncontrolled intersection. They were fine. The car was not. Not having faced any decisions about cars in nearly ten years, we immediately began the research on what to get next for our one and only family vehicle. Hybrid or not? Compact or wagon? Side airbags too? What about diesel?
One thing we were certain of – it would not be a new car. Both for financial and environmental reasons, we did all our research in the used car market. We even contemplated buying a compact diesel station wagon from a few states away for its stunning gas mileage. In the end, we found an acceptable conventional vehicle from a local small dealer, still second guessing ourselves about forgoing the diesel.
And then, a few days later a new report was released. It turned out that diesel fumes, because of the soot they emit, are so bad for their effect on climate change that any savings in gas mileage is canceled out. That thing you thought was so righteous? It’s not.
That thing that you thought would save you, in fact is killing you.
Forgive us Lord, for all our efforts to save ourselves. We make terrible messiahs.
