I'M OKAY, YOU'RE OKAY

          When I was in grade school in the 50’s, we used to have Civil Defense drills by hiding under our desks—just in case. Just in case of what wasn’t all that clear, but it seemed like there might be some kind of danger that the desks would protect us from. Of course, when you think about it, in a real attack, should it have happened, the desks might not have been much protection. Yet, somehow the drills were taken very seriously and all of us kids, in the vagueness of our understanding, followed the teacher’s orders. Fortunately, the real life need for doing so never came about.

           Some form of danger, though, has always been with us. In general, the world is not a safe place overall. The kinds of harm that can come to us take many shapes and sizes. There are those that we call “natural disasters,” for which nature is blamed on being itself; there are those that are the result of “man’s inhumanity to man,” for which the meanness and lack of a sense of humanity that exists in some people brings disastrous harm to anyone within reach of its power; there are those that are the result of ignorance or lack of knowledge regarding the dangers of certain forms of nature around us—poisonous creatures and elements of nature including bacteria and viruses; there are those that result from a moment of carelessness or clumsiness or disregard for general safety.

          That list is very general and does not include all the possibilities of harm that can come to us as creatures on earth. Some are within our control and others we are totally helpless against. You could say that we live in a constant state of vulnerability from day to day.

          Now that I’ve painted a rather grim picture of human existence, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking about. To borrow the words of the title of a book by Thomas Harris from several years ago, I’m Okay, You’re Okay, that, my friends, is what we have to go on. That is the state of existence for most of us most of the time. Yes, it’s true that anything can happen any time—that’s always been the case; just ask the people of Pompeii if you can find any. Or ask anyone who has been the victim of a major event that suddenly brought about discomfort, pain, loss, illness, or any other form of suffering.

          The point is, though, that most of the time most of us are okay. I think that we do life an injustice when we are constantly on edge. Life, after all, is a gift and all that we have. We obviously need to take appropriate precautions in these days—wearing masks, social distancing, etc.—all those things, plus whatever we can do to make the world a better place (which is something we each need to figure out for ourselves). But as someone once said, “Worry is interest paid on trouble before it becomes due.”

          I don’t actually know whether our hiding under the desks would have been much help in an attack, and fortunately we never had to find out first hand. But after we did the drill, we all went outside for “play period."