Let's take life as it come to us

To the editor:

Was it Socrates who said, "The unexamined life is not worth living"? My students (when I had students) would quote this piously and examine life and find it not worth living. I prefer to quote the late Julia Childs, who said, "I hope you have never eaten anything because someone told you it was good for you." In my youth I was surrounded by "experts" who told me that all of the signs had been fulfilled and that the world was doomed. One minister told me, "It cannot possibly last for five more years." This expert has been dead for 60 years.

Much more recently someone told me that sometime within the next 50,000 years the New Madrid Fault will destroy this area. Other gurus tell me that obesity is killing all of us, and yet we live longer each year.

I am not willing to push our two grandchildren into a life of fear. I will take chances and not build a fallout shelter. I have more confidence in American Emerson, who says "Trust thyself," than in Greek Socrates, and in Jonathan Swift, who told his friends, "I would rather die in a ditch than study philosophy."

PETER HILTY, Cape Girardeau