My fun exchange with Joe about our fear of ending up like Jerry Ford reminded me of some points about how odd fear is.
Ed Wood made movies in the 1950s that were so bad and so cheap that he became famous for it. He was a transvestite and made a movie about it, in which I think he starred.
Wood was NOT a homosexual, he was a transvestite. Apparently women’s underthings made him feel closer to women — a mother fixation? He used them as a security blanket. In World War II he actually parachuted into combat in a bra and panties.
Everybody else in The Greatest Gerneration talks about their heroism in facing death. Wood said his real fear had nothing to do with jumping several thousand feet into a battle.
According to Wood his fear was that he would be wounded and the medics would undress him and find out he was wearing a BRA!
But what about the death all the rest of The Greatest Generation blubberingly cry about aving to face? Wood just thought of himself as one more of millions of men who went into combat. This was before they started weeping over their own bravery and calling themselves The Greatest Generation. What bothered him was that bra and those panties!
I believe what Wood said because I had a similar experience.
I saw a number of men have their guts ripped out and dying after being hit by shrapnel. I was lying there and found blood on my stomach and figured I had had it. But my reaction was odd. I’ve never been all that fond of being alive, so what hit me was, “Well, this is it.”
Another experience really scared me. I spent a few minutes that seemed a year lying on my back without being able to move — I will deny all this on the proper occasion. I had landed on my neck and I was convinced that I had been crippled from the neck down. That TERRIFIED me.
I have dealt with paraplegics, which is a lot less bad thant he complete neck-down crippling “Superman” later suffered — but even being that bad off was not what scared me. You see, most of what I did had no official sanction and no official support. If I were crippled up there would be no veterans’ benefits.
So almost every time I took chances I was risking my FAIMLY without their knowledge. The burden would fall on my brothers and sisters. They could not let a member of the family simply starve, but they had their own lives to live, their own families to support. A complete cripple is a HORRIBLE burden, welfare services notwithstanding.
Death didn’t scare me, but THAT did.
The same conscience that made me take the risks also tortured me about taking them. But I HAD to.
I was not afraid of dying, but I was afraid of crippling.
Fear is a very individual thing.
#1 by Mark on 10/14/2006 - 10:59 am
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“I was not afraid of dying, but I was afraid of crippling.”
I had the same fear when I was a teenager. I used to do a bit of reckless driving, illegal drag racing, and high speed late night highway driving as (back then) I was a thrill seeker. I also ran horses at break neck speeds just to feel the wind in my hair, knowing one misstep and I’d be damaged goods. My biggest fear wasn’t crashing and dying — tt was crashing and living. Now that I’m older and “alot less bolder” I look back on my past and wonder just what the hell was surging thru my veins to make me do such stupid things.
#2 by Shari on 10/14/2006 - 11:40 am
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Some years ago, my husband and I were driving through the Wind RiverCanyon in Wyoming in December. I was driving and hit a patch of black ice. I skidded into the left lane as a Semi was barreling toward us. I remember feeling perfectly calm, thinking I’ll be dead in a minute. However, we skidded onto the shoulder as the truck wizzed past. Afterwards my heart started pounding and my husbands leg was shaking as he insisted on taking the wheel. I think it’s true there are worse things than dying. People also go through a lot of stupid, humiliating, medical tests, that aren’t really nessesary, just because they were told they might die,IMO