Worries

I’m bleeding again. Nothing serious, just a scratch. It’ll stop soon.

Ironically, I was searching for the safety guard for the scroll saw because I promised to refit it before putting my hands near that blade. It gets in the way, but then that was probably the point of it. Anyway, I caught my arm on something sharp in one of the boxes of stuff but at least I found that safety guard.

I’m not used to having someone worry about me. I’ve never been a worrier myself until recently, but then I spent most of the last three decades pretty much oblivious to the world. Last I recall, everyone was scared of nuclear war and a new Ice Age. Then it became rising sea levels and mass immigration. Now it seems everyone worries about everything.

Being scared of nuclear war was an odd one. They used to tell us we’d get three minutes’ warning before the bombs hit. What were we supposed to do in three minutes? What if you were out in the garden when the news came on the TV?

In the end, most of us decided we’d rather not have the warning at all. One second happy-go-lucky, the next second radioactive ash. Sounds like a good clean death, and we’d enter whatever afterlife there might be in a good mood.

Now we have to worry about being inexpertly decapitated by a lunatic with a knife, or shot while sunbathing, or just plain old stabbed. These are all horrible and massively painful ways to die. Can’t we have our atomisation by nuclear explosion worries back? They were, in retrospect, so much easier to deal with.

Those grooming gangs in the Rotherham area are finally being rounded up, slowly. Not too fast or there’d be nothing to worry about. The rogue travellers who have had pretty much free rein for so long are now being stamped on. Slowly. Not too fast, you have to stay worried about those too.

And of course, ISIS. Or whatever satellite group claims the name. There is now talk of sending in the military to fight them. That’ll be the same military that has been hammered by cuts, underfunded, undermanned, underequipped and with morale beaten down by the threat of redundancy notices being issued on the battlefield. Yes, that military is to take on a guerilla army that’s dressed like civilians and will then be castigated for shooting people who are dressed as civilians.

Going in to war knowing you have no way to really win must be the ultimate feeling of hopelessness. Whatever worries appear in my life surely cannot compare to that.

These days there is so much to worry about that I can’t find it in me to worry about any of it. It’s an overload of external worries. Yes, it’s dangerous out there in the world but you know what? It always was and always will be.

You can’t go through life worrying that you might be beheaded while unfashionably dressed in an Iraqi desert. That worry is easily circumvented by not going there.

Yes, you might get stabbed in the street or even in your own home. Trust me on this, it doesn’t need any fanatical interpretation of any religion for that to happen. That risk has always existed and will continue to exist even if knives are banned from private homes.

Guns are banned but people still get shot. Drugs are banned but people still go crazy on crystal meth. Criminal gangs and some religious fanatic groups are illegal but they’re still here.

Child abuse is illegal but still happens. It’s not new. Even the scale of it is not new. Most of the cases coming to light are historic, from years back. Nobody seems much interested in stopping the abuse that will be happening right now. It’s so much easier to prosecute the old cases.

So many things to worry about. So many scares and fears. So many monsters under the bed. There seems to be a new one every day.

Yet I don’t worry about any of them.

I worry about what they’re distracting us all from.

 

 

(I’ve stopped bleeding, by the way. I know someone out there would want to know that)