Just when I thought political correctness couldn’t get any more incorrect, here comes this news tidbit: officials in Australia and New Zealand have decided that shark attacks occurring along their shores can no longer be called shark attacks.
From now on, those terrifying assaults must be called “negative shark encounters” or, in the most extreme cases, “shark bites.” We wouldn’t want to hurt the sharks’ feelings now, would we?
Have these people ever watched “Jaws”?
This must be what happens to the brains of officials who don’t have enough to do because their countries have been totally locked down, due to Covid, for way too long.
Like so much of what I hear and read these days, this effort to put a better spin on shark attacks defies common sense. I’m pretty sure someone who’s had an appendage chomped off by a shark wouldn’t describe their experience as merely a “negative encounter.”
I admit this piece of crazy caught my attention because I’m not a shark fan. In fact, sharks are no. 2 on my list of God’s creatures I never want to encounter up close. As I explained in my last column, snakes occupy the top spot, not because they’re more deadly than sharks, but because I don’t have to worry about encountering sharks in my garage, yard, or woods.
To be attacked by a shark, one has to be where they are. And unless one is tossed overboard whilst traveling on a boat, one will be where sharks are only because one has voluntarily chosen to be there.
I love the beach, but at this point in my life I’d rather lazily soak up the therapeutic sights and sounds of the sea without actually getting in it and sharing space with sharks, jellyfish and other critters with potentially nefarious intentions. Unless, of course, I happen to be with my grandkids and they ask me to frolic in the waves with them. All bets are off when those cuties ask me to do stuff.
I read that the odds of having a “negative shark encounter” are somewhere around one in 4.5 million. One source said I would be more likely to die from a flying champagne cork, yet I’m certainly not afraid of champagne bottles. Death by cork seems like an altogether better way to go than being eaten by a fish.
Irrational fear—not the God-given instinct that alerts us of real danger, but the intense emotion that causes us to be afraid of imagined danger—is a powerful, though illogical, force. It’s also one of the devil’s favorite weapons to use against us.
Like all of Satan’s tactics, the irrational fear he incites is based on lies. The kind of lies that cause me to erroneously believe every shark is licking its chops and lying in wait for juicy legs like mine to appear on its dinner table.
Jesus told us straight up that Satan is “a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). He throws lies at us all day long, hoping some will stick and we’ll live small lives with boundaries determined, at least in part, by those false beliefs.
I believe those lies are also behind some of the crazy, upside-down, politically correct thinking that’s so prevalent today.
The Bible says that in the last days, people will perish “because they refused to love the truth and so be saved” (2 Thessalonians 2:10). Oh, how we need to love and speak the plain truth, even if it’s uncomfortable, inconvenient, expensive, and unpopular. Lest we forget, Jesus described Himself as “the way, the truth, and the life.”
When we drift from truth, even in relatively unimportant matters, we drift from Him. And that, my friends, is much more deadly than a negative encounter with a shark.