Who among us doesn't succumb to irrational fears from time to time? For me, sharks are the dark nemesis bubbling up from the subterranean straits of my imagination.
I blame Peter Benchley's novel "Jaws" and Steven Spielberg's 1975 movie based on it for providing an archetype that instilled this fear in me during my impressionable years.
So when I heard that lawyer Johnnie Cochran was mulling a lawsuit against a Bahamian hotel on behalf of a Wall Street banker who lost a leg after a shark attack earlier this month, I sympathized. If anyone can squeeze money and culpability out of a shark, Mister Johnnie's da' man.
Cochran is considering hitting the hotel with a negligence suit for failing to warn his client that the Caribbean is full of sharks and for employing lifeguards who didn't immediately jump into the water when they saw a plume of blood and a man splashing around yelling "shark, shark!"
I feel sorry for the banker, of course. Lifeguards are morally and legally obligated to do their jobs no matter what. But I think we also have to be real here. Not many folks are so dedicated to their jobs that they'll sacrifice a limb for the sake of a paycheck.
In recent weeks, shark attacks have grabbed headlines all over the world. Last weekend, there were six attacks in the Daytona Beach area during a surfing competition. The waters were filled with people trying to catch the last good waves of the summer despite warnings of heightened shark activity in the area.
Nonswimmers like myself naturally assume that surfers who ignore shark warnings are society's best advertisement for a moratorium against cloning, at least until Darwinism thins humanity's ranks of reckless idiots to acceptable levels.
But I'm starting to wonder if surfers with their live-and-let-live attitudes toward sharks are the ones who've been correct all along. Statistically speaking, sharks are neither man-eaters or man-hunters. More people are killed by dogs every year than have been killed by sharks in the last 100 years. Of the 75 attacks on humans by sharks annually, only 10 result in death. Ten fatalities out of 6 billion souls ain't bad, especially when most shark fatalities are usually provoked.
In other words, the chances are greater that a random stranger reading this column will be butchered by O.J. Simpson, Mister Johnnie's most infamous client, than end up in the digestive tract of a shark. Still, it's sobering to realize that the chances for dying either way are slim, but not out of the question.
There's a shark holocaust going on all right, but it isn't what we portray in the media. Twenty million to 30 million sharks a year are killed for food and sport. Millions get tangled-up in vast commercial fishing nets that drag the ocean floor. It's a humiliating end for old, proud sea creatures that once nipped at the tails of dinosaurs.
In some ways, sharks are the victims of a crude form of marine-based racial profiling. No matter how low the actual incidence of shark attacks on humans, these relatively benign creatures occupy a unique place of horror in our collective psyches.
Fresh from his work on behalf of the growing reparations movement, Johnnie Cochran is too focused on securing justice for his injured client to weigh the implications of perpetuating an unfortunate smear against our shark brothers.
I don't like their beady, unblinking eyes either, but that doesn't mean they deserve to be on the endangered species list. Unlike "domesticated" pythons, boa constrictors and pit bulls, no one's tempted to play Dr. Doolittle with sharks except a few surfers on Daytona Beach who aren't as fond of their hands as they should be. Sharks really should be respected as the forces of nature they are.
Imagine, if the hotel had preemptively "warned" Mr. Cochran's client not to swim in the ocean because sharks are in it, it wouldn't have been too different from saying to an old white lady, "Hey, stay out of that elevator; there's a black man in it."
Hmmm. Perhaps that comparison is a bit extreme, but it underlines the extent to which I've begun to develop sympathy for sharks. I'm not ready to shout "we're all brothers under the fin," but I've finally decided that anything that's been around for 350 million years is all right with me.
Tony Norman's e-mail address is: tnorman@post-gazette.com
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