Being Fair

When I was a very small boy, of seven or eight years, living in the backwoods of western Oregon, and sometimes wandering through them alone and, needless to say, scared, there were, in fact, serious dangers in those woods--bears, cougars, coyotes--that I might, indeed should, have feared and sought to avoid. But instead, what I walked in terror of were snakes--which, except for garter snakes and the very occasional, easily avoided, rattlesnake, are virtually non-existent in the benign, temperate paradise of the woods of western Oregon.  Unlike, say, the Island-Continent of Australia, every square foot of which swarms or pullulates with the the most appalling variety of deadly venomous snakes in the world.  How do little Australian boys endure it?  Or Pakistani boys? Or Burmese boys? Well, one knows that some 50,000 Indians (mostly men) a year die of (mostly) cobra bites; while the Australian yearly death rate from snakebite is something like one every couple of years.  And the difference is that Australian emergency rescue services are extremely fast and efficient, while the comparable Indian emergency rescue services are virtually non-existent--and, more than that, Indian society in very large part, simply doesn't give a rusty fuck how many of its members die agonizing deaths from snakebite.