On Tuesday nights I watch PBS: Nova, Frontline, and Independent Lens. Tonight, Nova was about the influence of emotion on economic decisions and the collapse of 2008. Frontline looked into the growing trend of parents denying vaccines for their children. Independent Lens was about the Zaballeen in Cairo, Egypt -they were recycling 80 percent of Cairo's trash (which they consider a gift) until foreign companies came in to begin collecting and landfilling the trash.
I have no wise words or thoughts, but I was rather frustrated with the defiant mothers and cheering for the Zaballeen. Overly rational economists can simply go to hell.
Next weeks Nova is about Mt. St. Helens waking up. I went there several times when I lived in Portland, Oregon. Fascinating landscape. Frontline looks into for profit universities and Wall Street.
Information can be very disturbing. I try to limit it :-)
ReplyDeleteThe vaccine thing irks me, too.
I got whooping cough because I dodged a booster vaccination when I was sixteen. Fourteen years later, subway, New York, coughing child, wham, I had whooping cough.
I hope these mothers don't learn the horrible way, and too late. Perhaps that's what happens when you've lived in a protected society for a long time. You don't understand risk because you've never experienced it?
That horrible! Whooping cough always scared me when I was young-just sounded so terrible and was mysterious because no one had it due to the vaccines.
ReplyDeleteNow they have a vaccine for chicken pox and I must say that was a pretty miserable 2 weeks for me. I got it later than most of the kids in school.
I feel as if these parents are just afraid, or at least that's how Frontline presented it. They feel they are making a rational decision based on their exceptional knowledge (or pseudo knowledge) and cannot see their own fear as a judgement killer.
Sometimes I join this up with all the other survivalism, libertarianism, government hating.
Thats terrible to have whooping cough!
PS.
ReplyDeleteTuesday I call my depressing TV night
...I'm better now :-)
ReplyDeleteBut it was. Literally changed my life.