75-16-B3
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Pollution # 1[edit]
Transcript[edit]Memory is pretty selective when it comes to the good old days it leaves out a lot of the not so good. I'll be right back. Not so long ago I found myself in a discussion concerning the state of the world with some young people including my own children. Strangely enough, it wasn't old dad who was nostalgic about the good old days and sour about today's world. No, it was the "now" generation who were pessimistic about where we are and where we're going. They also seemed resentful toward me because I'd known that other world of yesterday when life was simple and good with joy on every hand. Before I knew it my memory machine was functioning the way it's supposed to on a psychiatrist couch dredging up particulars not just the rosy nostalgia that comes to mind when you hear an old song. Now don't get me wrong my memories are pretty happy and I enjoy closing my eyes now and then for a re-run or two. But I also find life exciting and good today in truth better in most respects. I looked at these young people and wanted them to feel good about the world they've inherited. They'd already covered such things as present-day pollution, our grasping materialism and the commercial rip-off in modern-day merchandising. So for a little while they heard about the old nightly chore of banking the coal furnace (shoveling ashes on the fire to keep the coals alive through the night). The cold early morning journey to the basement to shake the grate, uncover the embers and shovel in coal and dressing in the shivering cold while you waited for the house to warm. As for their worry about air pollution-they were reminded that in the earlier times every chimney in town belched black smoke and soot every day from fall till summer. Having been born in a small country town I could also tell them of that nighttime walk through the snow to that little wooden building out back of the house-a journey repeated in the morning. Summer brought the flies incubated in those outhouses and there was an outhouse for every home store and public building. I went on about the apple barrel in the cellar, the icebox, the lack of fresh vegetables in winter. But let me go back a century or more so this won't be just a personalized trip down memory lane. Dr. John J. McKetta, Chairman of the National Air Quality Commission has written an essay which helps set the record straight on pollution and related subjects. In passing he gives a capsule description of the really good old days about 150 years ago. "For one thing," he says, "life was short. Life expectancy for males was 38 years." It was a hard 38 years too for the work week was 72 hours. For women it was even worse, their household chores ran to about a 98-hour week. They scrubbed floors by hand, made clothes the same way, brought in firewood, cooked in heavy iron pots and fought off insects without pesticides. There were no fresh vegetables except in their season of ripening so vitamin deficiency diseases were common. Epidemics were an annual occurrence and usually claimed the life of someone in the family. If we think water pollution is a problem now-it was deadly then. One typhoid epidemic in Philadelphia caused by polluted water carried off one-fifth of the population. It was a time when most people never traveled more than 20 miles from their birthplace, never heard an orchestra or saw a play. As Dr. McKetta says, "Perhaps the simple life was not so simple." Because we've all been treated to so much misinformation about pollution I'm going to give you some more of the facts the doctor is collecting the next couple of days. I think you'll be surprised and relieved he says and proves that we're not on the brink of ecological disaster. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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