A Facebook friend from Atlanta was discoursing about having to stop ISIL over there before they “start cutting heads off over here.”
I was instantly worried because the idea of having one’s head lopped off is horrific.
And once I stop worrying about that, I can get all twisted up over Ebola, which, to listen to some news mongers, is coming soon to an airport near me. The virus that has killed one American, a naturalized citizen who lived and died in Africa, is certainly in the running right now for the Scariest Thing Going.
But it’s always something, isn’t it? As a nation, we’re always hyperventilating about something or other that, in some cases, we can hardly remember a year or two later.
There are plenty of sober voices that advise us not to live our lives in fear of such things. They tell us the terrors we obsess over are ultimately random and extremely unlikely — statistically speaking, that is.
Still, we fret.
There are constant Stranger Danger alerts about our children, there’s Ebola lurking just out of sight, and Good Morning America recently broadcast a news scare about home invasions. That one had a security expert recommending installing a “safe room,” a secure haven in the home where your family can retreat from the intruders and grab an old cell phone stashed there to call 911.
If we need fuel to feed our fear, our friends in the media are happy to oblige.
We could worry about getting killed in a car crash (the odds are one in 112 over a lifetime, or three times as likely as being killed in an assault with a firearm, according to odds prepared by the National Safety Council). Instead, we fret that someone’s going to snatch our kids, give us a exotic disease that causes bleeding from our ears, or that masked gunmen will barge into our homes.
(Interesting side note: you have a greater likelihood of being legally executed, 1 in 96,203, than of being killed by lightning, 1 in 136,011.)
Ultimately, the odds that something will get us are 1 in 1. More than likely, something extremely boring that we actually do have some control over, like plaque in our arteries.
But reports like Good Morning America’s make for better ratings. Plus, it’s easy to find a “safety expert” who has a stake in peddling fear — selling intercoms, home alarms, motion detectors, pepper spray, advice and, of course, weaponry. Having written about crime for 32 years, I too, can render advice on how not to get home-invaded: Get a deadbolt; and don’t peddle drugs or run a gambling operation.
Legit stats on home invasions are notoriously hard to come by. Burglaries with someone home can be everything from a masked robbing crew to someone coming home and scaring off a neighborhood kid who’s after the flat screen. A Department of Justice study said that in two-thirds of the more serious cases of a burglary where someone is home, the resident knows the bad guy. Often, the homeowners aren’t all that wholesome themselves.
The news purveyors like to make it seem like it might happen to you, Family Guy. But that same Bureau study said married couples with kids are the most infrequent victims of “home invasion.”
Here’s a juicy irony: Just minutes after the home-invasion segment, GMA ran a piece saying that stress increases the chances of Alzheimers.
If that's the case, us news junkies are doomed. This summer, an NPR-Harvard study of 2,500 Americans found that 25 percent had experienced a "great deal" of stress in the past month. "And these stressed-out people said one of the biggest contributors to their day-to-day stress was watching, reading or listening to the news," the NPR report said.
Hello, Ebola!
The news directors and scare-mongers have been waiting for you their whole lives. Watching reports of the disease, one might think this is the End of Days.
Reality check here: So far, 4,000 of the 8,400 people who have caught the virus in the recent outbreak have died. Horrible, absolutely. But according to the New York Times last week, just 14 of the cases (six in the U.S.) have been treated outside West Africa.
AJC editor Victoria Loe Hicks is preparing to go to Liberia to cover the story, so she did her own reality check.
“The current number of Ebola cases in Liberia, including probable and suspected, as well as confirmed, is about 4,000 (per the World health Organization),” she wrote me. “The population is 4 million. So the incidence is 1 in 1,000. According to a Washington Post story today, health experts think that for every reported case, about 1.5 cases go unreported. Applying that math, fewer than 3 in 1,000 Liberians now have Ebola.
“That doesn’t in any way suggest that this is less than a major crisis, but it did give me a slightly different perspective on the situation on the ground right now.”
Is she scared? Probably a bit. But she is taking a rational approach before diving into a scary place. And, no doubt thinks about those 997 Liberians without symptoms.
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