Showing posts with label addiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label addiction. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Still there, nowhere.


Spring is here, and the abandoned homeless camp in the middle of Omaha isn't.

Abandoned anymore, that is. When we visited the site in February, it appeared that the person or persons using the primitive flop had wisely flown the (ramshackle) coop for the winter.


Nestled in the treeline between a park and the Keystone Trail -- and across the Little Papillion Creek from an apartment complex and supermarket -- the rough lean-to shows signs of life. And liquor.

Bicyclists ride by and joggers plod past the wooded flop without noticing what, and who, might be yards away. Ditto for the skate-park skateboarders and the softball players.

Because you don't notice a shelter that isn't much of one, however, does not mean it's not there. And because we long ago stopped noticing those among us who are cash poor but -- oftentimes -- flush with addiction, mental illness or both, it doesn't mean they're not lurking among the trees and brush of the urban greenscape. 

Or perhaps a downtown bus shelter.

Or a park bench.

Maybe beneath an overpass.

Or a van down by the river, for all you know.

We want "something done" about the problem when the homeless start to annoy us. 

When they don't, it's all good -- we go back to worrying about the zombie apocalypse . . . which doesn't actually exist. 


The spiders, after all, aren't in our clothes.

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Will cell-phone jones fry your brain?

If a prominent British cancer expert is right, young people are doomed. They basically live life with microwave ovens permanently attached to their ears.

The
scary story from London is in today's Independent (and note that the British term "mobile phone" equals the American term "cell phone"):
Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded. He says people should avoid using them wherever possible and that governments and the mobile phone industry must take "immediate steps" to reduce exposure to their radiation.

The study, by Dr Vini Khurana, is the most devastating indictment yet published of the health risks.

It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long.

Earlier this year, the French government warned against the use of mobile phones, especially by children. Germany also advises its people to minimise handset use, and the European Environment Agency has called for exposures to be reduced.

Professor Khurana – a top neurosurgeon who has received 14 awards over the past 16 years, has published more than three dozen scientific papers – reviewed more than 100 studies on the effects of mobile phones. He has put the results on a brain surgery website, and a paper based on the research is currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.

He admits that mobiles can save lives in emergencies, but concludes that "there is a significant and increasing body of evidence for a link between mobile phone usage and certain brain tumours". He believes this will be "definitively proven" in the next decade.
TALK ABOUT your sobering articles. I now am so glad that I have a big enough aversion to the telephone in general that I've never wanted to have a cell phone around, except for emergencies. Almost never use one of the damn things.

But I do fear for all the young people I know, for whom the cell-phone jones hardly could be more intractable than those for meth or nicotine. You just don't need to be that bloody "connected" -- you just don't.

There is value in being alone with your thoughts. That is, beyond reducing one's brain-cancer risk.

And the brain-cancer thing is horrific struff indeed. My father died of brain cancer. You don't want to go that way . . . and you don't want to see a loved one go that way.

Trust me on this one.