Marc Legare is a philosopher and motorcycle adventurist.
He has travelled extensively, worked and lived in Australia, US, and across Canada.
He has a varied working career including: Firefighter, Lawyer, Navy, Motorcycle Importer, plus others.
He chose to return to southern Saskatchewan because of his family's deep roots here.
As a columnist, Legare's columns will offer food for thought.
In our modern world, there is so much to be scared of. At least we are endlessly told of just how scared we should be. Let's take a moment out of our navel-gazing fear and pause to remember another reality. Specifically, catastrophes that never happened.
I am a child of the cold war era. For those who are too young to remember, it was an ever-looming horror movie waiting to happen. The news was full of information of how many nuclear weapons were in the world and just how many were pointed directly at us. The nuclear war was a constant lingering nightmare served up every evening on the 6 o'clock news. If things went wrong politically, we would be annihilated on any given day of the week; but it didn't happen.
Today we still have thousands of nuclear weapons yet, the media is on to other "more important" anxiety producing issues.
That was manmade. What about things in nature? There were world-ending dramas in nature that were going to kill us as well. The Ozone Layer Depletion was one such. Now that was a scary one. In the mid-1980s scientists told us the ozone layer had a gigantic hole in it over the Antarctic and IT WAS GETTING BIGGER! Oh no, we are all going to die from skin cancer and our once loved sun will be our enemy! Nope, that too never materialized.
Killer Bees! Lookout, there were psychotic, highly aggressive, poisonous dangerous bees, living in Central America and HEADING OUR WAY! Yikes! Were doomed! But, WHEW, another no go.
There were several little scares that clogged the mind. The moon rocks were going to have some deadly disease or radiation that will get us. Microwave ovens were dangerous. The odd mention of an asteroid crashing to earth causing permanent winter was brought up when there was not enough bad news to go around.
Let's not forget Y2K. People out buying end of the world necessities and dehydrated food because the worldwide computer system was going to crash and send the planet into chaos. No, another miss.
It seems lately fear is fed to us for breakfast. It is important to take a step back and remember that our world has been presented with danger after danger after danger. Most of those calamities never were.
I will leave the final word to Mark Twain. "I had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened"...
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
