Reflection on article, “How Americans are living dangerously”

Reflection on article, “How Americans are living dangerously”

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1562978,00.html
This is the link to my article.


The article, ‘how Americans are living dangerously’ talks about how life becomes more difficult because of the several things that try to kill us everyday. The title itself is bias as it suggests that it is only the Americans who face all the problems and have to live dangerously due to them. This isn’t the least bit to true as people all over the world suffer and face similar problems. Infact people all over the world are even killed as a result of these so called ‘problems’. The article only talks about the things that try to kill us but doesn’t mention all those things that actually save us every day. Even the problems stated by the writer are vague and many readers might not be able to relate to them. Food is a necessity and so the example of a sausage getting lodged in one’s throat doesn’t make much sense as if one doesn’t eat food they would die anyway. The writer also assumes that people worry far less about the cholesterol level in a hamburger then they do about the mad cow pathogen that might be in the hamburger . It is also true that these pathogens are harmful and can cause diseases but the author with a bias overlooks this and only talks about the cholesterol which he believes contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 people annually. There is no proof that this statement is true and it is a bias statement as the writer has overlooked the other side of the story. He also generalizes and assumes that people have the habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities. This may or may not be true and he hasn’t taken into account the views of another person.
There is also a bias in the statement,’20% adults still smoke’ as he is only talking about adults not taking into account the teenagers who in today’s age smoke.
The article does encourage one to think about the silly things we often worry about, ignoring the bigger problems in our lives.
The writer is trying to spread awareness about problems that occur in our day to day lives. He mentions how we look at a bag of spinach for fear of e. coli bacteria while filling our carts with fat sodden French fries and salt-crusted nachos. This evokes a sense of guilt in the reader and provokes one to think about these things. This situation is similar to that of a penny wise, pound foolish person. This article opens our eyes to the fact that we often turn a blind eye to certain things. We only see and observe what we want to while conveniently ignoring that which we don’t wan to. This is the main aim of the article and though bias and vague at times the writer has to quite an extent been successful in conveying his message.