All the things I used to worry about

I like to think that I am a calm, relaxed person. No matter what life throws my way, I want to believe that, and I certainly do try, I can roll with the punches, as they say, and not let anything get me down.

Well, I have been lying to myself. While sometimes I handle the stress and uncertainty of life with the composure of a well-practiced monk or the most stoic of philosophers, clinging to the words of the old hymn, “I Know Who Holds Tomorrow,” most of the time I am worried about something. In fact, you can call me a worrywart.

Even as a kid I could always find something to fret about, and like most worries, they never came to pass. I shudder to think of the hours wasted, staring into space or lying awake at night on time wasted thinking about things that really did not matter.

Now, as an adult facing the real struggles of life, like the rising cost of living; making sure my own children are taken care of; and trying to figure out the source of that new strange noise my car is making, it’s fun to remember the things that worried younger me.

Here are some of them:

Quicksand: The world was allegedly full of this natural boobytrap, and there wasn’t a children’s book, cartoon or video game that didn’t have the protagonist struggling to pull themselves free from a patch of quicksand. If you didn’t act fast, a body could be sucked into the earth and never seen again, leaving only a hat comically floating on the surface.

Quicksand can occur in the United States, but typically only on beaches and coastal wetlands. While I’ve been stuck in the mud, walking or driving too close to a body of water, I’ve never seen or heard a credible account of quicksand.

Mad cow disease: In the early 1990s you could not turn on the news or pick up a newspaper without seeing something this strange ailment killing cows. As it turns out, if you feed a cow food made from other cows, which used to be a common practice, it could develop bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a deadly degenerative infection of the central nervous system.

The BSE crisis was mostly a European problem, but the effects were felt worldwide as people became afraid of eating possibly tainted beef. This, and the undercover reports on unsanitary conditions of meat processing and packing plants that were popular at the time, forced my parents to convince me that every hamburger set before me was fully cooked and safe for consumption. I wasn’t the only person with that fear though. Remember when the Texas beef industry sued Oprah?

The hole in the ozone:  Another fear established by sensational reports and children’s programming. We should all be fried to a crisp by now thanks to Styrofoam coolers and hairspray releasing chemicals into the atmosphere that eat away at the Earth’s natural barrier, the ozone layer, against the sun’s harmful rays.  

Captain Planet had me convinced that we were all doomed, but the ozone is on the mend and now the World Meteorological Organization predicts the ozone will be whole again in 40 years. As long as people don’t go back to 80s hairstyles.