Posted on 06/05/2003 7:14:40 AM PDT by rhema
USA Today has three obsessions: Death by SUV, death by airplane crash, and death by hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Judging by amount of coverage, USA Today puts jets, Ford Explorers and estrogen as the three primary causes of death in the U.S. SARS and mad cow disease have moved up the ranks a bit. SARS, combined artfully with airplanes, has USA Today readers believing that flying west over the Pacific finds death's icy finger waiting for you at the International Date Line. USA Today suffers from what Dr. Lewis Goldfrank, head of New York's Bellevue Hospital ER, calls "misplaced anxieties."
Fretting over infinitesimal risk has consumed a newspaper and a nation. In the past 25 years, 3,222 people were killed on U.S. soil as a result of terrorism. The chances of dying as a result of bioterrorism: 1 in 56.4 million. The chances of mad cow disease taking a bovine or human in the U.S.? Contrary to Oprah's fears, it's never happened.
Poor diet and lack of exercise contributed to 300,000 deaths in the U.S. last year. The Centers for Disease Control has $96 million allocated in 2003 for obesity programs. The homeland security program budget for 2003 is $3.5 billion.
Your chances of dying in a bicycle accident are 1 in 376,165, with better odds for those of us who understand that roads are for cars, not strident Birkenstockers dedicated to saving the environment whilst killing drivers who must swerve into curbs and semis to avoid hitting earth children on Schwinns. Are they vehicles? Are they pedestrians? Are they nuts? They ride circus toys amongst 2-ton vehicles (4-ton for SUVs, according to USA Today) yet demand immunity from grave injury.
Liberals want more than immunity from harm in death-defying activities. They seek to banish risks along ideological lines. Bicyclists are a hazard, period. Still, they are coddled, in the name of global warming, with an infrastructure of bike paths so rarely used that the lines look freshly painted after 20 years, save for the tire squeal marks from careening cars.
Air travel involves corporations and fossil fuel, so social reformists demand 100% accident-free performance. That goal is unattainable. Risk is inherent in traveling 600 mph 33,000 feet above the earth in changing weather conditions. Still, USA Today scrounges around looking for corporate misdeeds in every crash. More people die in auto accidents each year than have died in plane crashes in the history of aviation.
At best, safety data on SUV risk are muddled. Most of the Ford Explorer rollover deaths involved drivers not wearing seat belts. But, the goal of eliminating SUVs is squelched if driver responsibility rears its ugly head.
Liberals do not reduce risk via personal responsibility. The annual risk from dying of heart disease is 1 in 397. Dying from an alcohol-related incident (including liver disease) is 1 in 6,210. Last year, 14,000 died from AIDS (only 150 perinatal and 173 total pediatricAIDS cases were diagnosed in 2001). How do liberals respond to these ailments fixable by personal restraint? By suing McDonald's for selling greasy, fattening food and demanding a cure for AIDS as they recklessly refuse to heed prevention programs' admonitions.
Life and safety have tradeoffs, which bring me to hormones. HRT has saved marriages from manslaughter's ugliness. I've witnessed grown men on bended knee begging pharmacists on Saturday evenings for just enough pills to get their wives through the weekend. I often see Walgreen's pharmacists standing outside their drive-throughs prepared to toss HRT into cars driven by women on the edge, often with clipped bicyclists hanging to their side-view mirrors. With HRT, menopause's worst is vanquished. Hot flashes cool, depression flees, water dissipates and life feels normal. Studies once showed that HRT prevented heart disease and osteoporosis. New studies, reported by USA Today, conclude that HRT presents an increased risk of breast cancer, stroke and dementia. Some of us had dementia before HRT - that's why we took it! The government, wringing its bureaucratic hands mightily over an additional death per 10,000, halted its 20-year study of women on Prempro. Evil civil servants, taking Prempro!
A cadre of us doesn't care. We have looked menopause in the eyebrowless eyes and concluded we'd rather not live a life that involves waking up each day as Sybil. Sans hormones, our families are unclear who will emerge. Some mornings Mommie Dearest appears. Other days bring Melanie Wilkes. Other times find us wielding chain saws, poised to remodel the kitchen. But, with HRT, well, tomorrow is just another day. Perhaps shorter lives, perhaps longer, but for some of us, a life without HRT is an unexamined life. We did not require a government study to understand that ingesting the processed urine of pregnant mares (one source of HRT) might have some side effects.
So, USA Today, do your worst. We like our SUVs, enjoy jet travel and take the real killers, heart disease and obesity, under our control. Lighten up, mighty McPaper, or women with chain saws will invade your editorial offices. They will drive their SUVs there. As you try to quell the rebellion, think HRT. It has its risks, but it does soothe the savage beast. Just assume your pro-abortion posture: Hell hath no fury like a woman deprived of choice.
OK, fine!!! I love all kinds of women...but I really love intelligent, funny women.
And how fortunate are conservatives to have the likes of Jennings, Ann Coulter, Kathleen Parker, Michelle Malkin, Mona Charen, Linda Chavez, and Suzanne Fields. Until she quit writing to care for her cancer-stricken husband, Linda Bowles was in that class, too.
The liberals, on the other hand, have . . . who? Helen Thomas? Molly Ivins? Hillary Clinton? Maybe there's a wit somewhere, but most of the writers on the left's distaff side are hectoring hags.
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