Don't Do This At Home

I once went to the hardware store to buy some paint thinner and a pack of cigarettes. I took a 1 gallon glass jug to be filled up with the thinner from a big drum. The cigarettes were for my mom. Yeah, it was a few years ago now, 1958. I was nine years old and this happened just an hour’s drive from San Francisco, California. The world is a much different place now than it was on that day, and I doubt that anyone now living in the US and reading this is able to witness a child buying cigarettes or a flammable liquid in a glass container today. But where I live now, it’s quite common to see a child buying cigarettes or a bottle of rum for a parent, or a liter of gasoline in a glass Pepsi bottle. These things may even be legally prohibited here in the Philippines, but so is having more than 2 people riding on a motorcycle, yet I observe any of these events everyday. 

You have to be on your toes a little bit around here, aware of your surroundings and paying attention to how things work. It’s best not to just sleepwalk through life, in other words. But perhaps that’s just me; I like life to have a little edge to it.

Less than a century ago, there were far fewer laws and regulations in everyone’s lives. These are all meant to make us safer and more comfortable. But as life gets cushier, so do our brains, I think. And come to think of it, a far greater share of the world’s population survive without the aid of legal protective cocoons than what people have become so accustomed to in the Western world.