Читать книгу Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night - Lewis Grizzard - Страница 11

America’s Newest Killer

Maybe all of us should band together and say “Enough is enough. Please don’t tell us what else will kill us.”

Where is all this going to end? First it was cigarettes. We are still being warned cigarettes will cause lung cancer or emphysema, not to mention turn our fingers and teeth yellow.

A lot of Americans have quit smoking. They want the ones who haven’t to do so immediately. Nonsmokers and smokers, I predict, will have a civil war eventually and kill off great numbers of both sides all in the name of health.

And cholesterol. Eat stuff that really tastes good and cholesterol will clog your arteries, and one day you’ll be sitting there eating a couple of fried eggs and you’ll drop dead of a heart attack.

“He should have watched his diet,” they’ll say at your funeral.

You can get cancer from just about everything, it seems. We mentioned smoking. But there’s asbestos, eating smoked foods, or drinking too much coffee.

And speaking of drinking, go right ahead and have another scotch, but you know your liver is rotting with every sip.

Then there’s AIDS. I don’t want to talk about AIDS anymore.

And let’s don’t forget how many near misses there are in commercial aviation. You’re sitting there in 23A and suddenly there’s a 727 coming down the aisle.

Also, we can’t forget that the ozone layer is disappearing from our atmosphere and one day we’ll all be fried because there won’t be anything left to protect us from the sun.

So, let’s say none of that gets you. Great, except now there’s something new to worry about—RADON!

You quit smoking, drinking, and eating fatty foods. You exercise every day, brush regularly with tartar-control toothpaste, and have annual checkups from your doctor.

You’ve eaten cereal until it’s coming out of your ears, you take all sorts of vitamins—and speaking of cereal, you even eat yours with prunes on top.

You’re the best friend your colon ever had.

But you’re still not safe because radon is here and it’s coming after you.

It’s down there in the ground under your house. You can’t see radon, and you can’t smell it, but it’s there.

It sneaks up through your basement. It comes up pipes and through cracks and you breathe it, and you might as well have kept sucking on those cigarettes, because radon can give you lung cancer, too.

If you want to be safe from this newest killer, you’ve got to buy a gadget that measures radon in your house, and if you’ve got it, then you have to get some guy to come over and make an assortment of repairs, and that’s going to cost you.

Wouldn’t we be better off if nobody told us about things like radon? Sure it might pick a few of us off, but we wouldn’t have to lie in our beds at night wondering how much radon the uranium under our condos is producing—and was that noise you just heard downstairs the Radon Monster coming to get you?

Worry kills, too. Would somebody please mention that to the Surgeon General.