"There but for the Grace of God, Go I"

Just a quick FYI, that I found utterly fascinating.

You know how, in Vampire mythology, exposure to direct sunlight kills them. It bakes them completely. I had watched "Legend" a year or so ago (the Will Smith remake of 'The Omega Man', which was not terribly good, but at least interesting) and in it, Mr. Smith, as one of the last "normal" people alive was capturing and studying these new "vampires", who of course, had this condition. He would experiment on them, then expose them to UV light to see what happened. He had a wall of about 50 who he'd accidentally killed because his experiments failed, and they roasted under the "light of the sun".

I always took this part of Vampire mythology to be acceptable as a standard "suspension-of-disbelief" to enjoy the stories.

Turns out...it is entirely real. A massively small amount of the population, in fact, is born with some kind of defect that does NOT protect the skin/blood/system from the radiation of the sun, and this small population...a very real group of people living today...would experience 3rd degree burns (i.e., all the way to the bone) if exposed to direct sunlight. These people cannot go outside, at all, until after dusk, or they would die.

And so, the "There but for the grace of God go I" is this: I am composed of all the same atoms and molecules that these people are. I, and the rest of us, not only resemble them, we but differ in a minuscule sub-micropscopic fragment of DNA. And I walk freely under the sun, and the worst I get (and yes, I am fair skinned, and did one single time, get a 1st degree burn [skin only] from hours and hours under that gigantic fusion-reaction-lamp that is called "Sol") is a "sun-burn".

"But for the grace of God" (or whatever you deem that to mean; natural selection, Tao, The One, The Many...don't care...WHATEVER "it" IS) you and I, who are not among them, walk in the face of BRUTAL radiation which can and should roast us to our bones, and we are unaffected. We just 'are'. And the fireflame of waves upon waves of body-roasting radiation...ehhh....they bother us not.

I find that fascinating.

And yes, I know, it does open up probably some other gigantic can-o-worms of all the OTHER things that should kill us all immediately and without comment, and don't. And perhaps, one by one I will look at them, to try to understand; why? It is the goodest and bestest of "why". But I would love to know...why.

I guess...wouldn't we all?