Tui of mental mosaic wrote me this morning, just as I was getting ready for a trip that starts in Germany and probably would involve sausages dancing like sugarplums in my head, hence the wurst in the title. Turns out Tui has a cold. She was trying to blog about the phenomenon, then perhaps she thought better of it:
…I’m gonna get a whole bunch of “I told you so” actions from (Italians) because of a certain attitude that Italians have about what causes illness.
Yeah, they’re gonna tell her that she went out in the air with wet hair. Betcha a Euro.
I know what she’s talking about. When I was in Sardinia, one of the local boys died while “swimming” in the Mediterranean. Now, most Sardinians don’t really swim all that well. That’s work. That’s not what going to the beach is for. But whenever word of the tragedy wafted across a street, someone from the other side would indignantly reply that the poor boy was seen drinking from a water bottle two and a half hours before entering the water and everybody knows that not allowing half a day for water or food or whatever to digest before entering the sea (or a small swimming pool), you are bound to wind up in the morgue with a toe tag sporting your name scribbled upon it.
The poor boy just up and fergot to think right.
Sure, it’s all strange. But I’m old. I actually remember when American mothers reacted exactly the same way when you managed to get a cold.
“You went out with your hair wet on a cold day. What did I tell you? Didn’t I warn you? I mean it’s not like everyone on the planet doesn’t know that going out with wet hair will bring on a cold to end all colds! How could you do this to yourself!?”
Of course, she was mad because she’d have to be home with me all day but would try to avoid me because in her heart and mind she knew damn well she’d get a cold when her sick kid coughed in her presence and spread all those gooey germs.
Ok, so Tui thinks that the Italian reaction is ridiculous. But it used to be the same in the US. I actually asked three people. Every one of them reported to me that they were told as children to avoid going outside with wet hair or they’d catch a cold.
So what changed to make us warrior-hardened folks less attuned to the mythology that once surrounded disease? What happened to a whole society that abandoned the notion of making the victim feel guilty because he or she didn’t follow the social rule-of-thumb about what was punishable by…dis-ease?
You’re gonna think this is nuts, but I’m thinkin’ its all wrapped up in that “Contract on America” that was foisted on us in the 80s. Essentially, it meant the end of the social contract. Government bigwigs stood up and vowed that the government would no longer support the citizens of this great land. The citizen was on his own. If a family couldn’t live on minimum wage, then tough, the government wasn’t to blame and damn if they’d lift a finger to legislate wages you could live on. What little was in the coffers that might be devoted to getting people on their feet after a tragedy would now be pushed upon corporations, which had become people, too, but people much more deserving of welfare than actually people, according to the government’s wizened kids.
So, free of any social contract, we no longer need to support the mythology of dis-ease, which, when it held sway, made us aware of our fragility, of the connections between our actions and the moral beliefs of the society we live in but are no longer attached to because it owes us nothing and we owe it diddly, too. We will eat what we want and spit the bad of it wherever we please. We will go out in a snow storm with our hair soppy wet and blame germs for our malaise and then come home and beat the dog.
But we are free. Free from all social obligations. Free from having to help little old ladies across the street. Damn it, we are freer than ever and beholden to no one. (Well, except for our government’s little spying on citizens thing, but still…)
And we’re afraid to travel because there’s no one that we trust to watch our house and all the crap we’ve got in there to prevent us from needing to commit social intercourse for our entertainment.
And boy does that save us some money these days.
Tui’s malfeasance has finally been discovered by Italian relatives. Read: Rebel without a Rhinovirus