Unjustified panic: Why are you so scared of all the wrong things?

By David McElroy · September 14, 2011

I was in a small group in the back yard of someone’s home when the talk turned to fear of terrorism. We were sitting next to the man’s pool while kids played in the water and the adults talked about scarier things.

“I’m just about scared to travel anywhere these days,” the man said. “The world is so scary now because of the terrorists. I’m sure not going to New York City or some big place like that. Why would anyone even think about living there these days?”

I hadn’t been saying anything, because I usually get myself into social trouble by being the lone dissenter in such situations. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, though, so I asked the man if he knew that more people were killed every single year in swimming pools than were killed in the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Someone scoffed. A couple of people laughed.

“Oh, the pool’s safe,” the man said. “We keep the kids away when we’re not around, so we can control this. But when you’re dealing with terrorists, you don’t have any control.”

I kept my mouth shut, because I knew there was no way to make him understand a very simple statistical fact. Almost 3,000 people died in the World Trade Centers attack, but close to 3,500 people die in U.S. swimming pools each and every year. Tell me which you should be more afraid of.

People are terrible at comparing risks and being afraid of the right ones. Many of them are so scared of terrorism that they’re willing to let politicians take away our freedoms, yet these same people would scream bloody murder if someone suggested they shouldn’t have a swimming pool or that maybe it’s statistically riskier to go riding around in their car for no apparent reason.

The chances of being killed by a terrorist in this country are about the same as your chances of being killed by a tornado, which is to say that it’s an exceedingly small possibility. If you want to worry, you should be worried about your health, your driving, your swimming pool and various other things that are much scarier. Take a look at the actual leading causes of death — and the numbers of deaths — and ask yourself whether heart disease or a car accident is a bit more likely to affect you than a terrorist attack.

For the past 10 years, we’ve based much of what we’ve done politically around a false idea — the idea that terrorism is a serious threat to our safety. We’ve destroyed many of our liberties. We’ve spent uncounted billions of wasted dollars. We’ve scared millions of people. And for what?

In the meantime, somewhere around 24,000 civilians have been killed by the fighting that came about because of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and around 107,000 civilians died in Iraq after the U.S. invasion to “liberate” the people. Our dollars are funding the deaths of many, many more innocent people than were killed when the World Trade Centers were attacked 10 years ago — and we’re continuing to create more enemies.

It’s time to quit being so scared of terrorism. It’s a terrible thing when people die in terrorist attacks, but it’s an even worse thing when we allow an aberration to change everything about our country and the freedoms its people enjoy. Take a look at a serious, adult analysis of the risks and then start worrying about your driving and your health instead.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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