Worried All The Time
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
It takes a worried man to sing a worried song
I'm worried now but I won't be worried longGot myself a Cadillac thirty dollars down
Got myself a brand new house five miles out of town
Got myself a gal named Sue treats me really fine
Yes, she's my baby and I love her all the time
(The Kingston Trio (Guard/Glazer), A Worried Man)"What, Me Worry?", Alfred E. Newman
Time Magazine asks why we worry so much. (One hopes this is the media trying to be funny in an understated fashion.) But they ask some serious questions about why we tend to worry to the point of the absurd over things that might, possibly, maybe, could-be remotely possible while totally ignoring things that we should by now know full well will kill us with a high degree of likelihood.
We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones. Six Muslims traveling from a religious conference were thrown off a plane last week in Minneapolis, Minn., even as unscreened cargo continues to stream into ports on both coasts. Shoppers still look askance at a bag of spinach for fear of E. coli bacteria while filling their carts with fat-sodden French fries and salt-crusted nachos. We put filters on faucets, install air ionizers in our homes and lather ourselves with antibacterial soap. "We used to measure contaminants down to the parts per million," says Dan McGinn, a former Capitol Hill staff member and now a private risk consultant. "Now it's parts per billion."
At the same time, 20% of all adults still smoke; nearly 20% of drivers and more than 30% of backseat passengers don't use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese. We dash across the street against the light and build our homes in hurricane-prone areas–and when they're demolished by a storm, we rebuild in the same spot. Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that it's something we'll never do exceptionally well, it's almost certainly something we can learn to do better.
It is quite long, but there actually are some interesting insights into the way humans assess risk and reward. It also discusses how we could do a lot better at communicating real risk assessment. What this all ignores, of course, is the media's own complicity in the skewing of reasonable discourse about real versus potential risk. While the media will render a "thoughtful" article on the surge of bullying in toddler daycare (said surge consisting of two three-year olds squabbling over the last of the Lego's) with a descriptive title like, "We're all going to die!!!" it is a bit hard to get perspective. Or when they report on "Mad Cow" disease (which nobody in the US has died from) with a headline like, "We're all going to die - NEXT TUESDAY," it becomes a bit hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
But, what, me worry?
By TC@LeatherPenguin, Sunday, 26 November , 2006 @ 9:14 pm
“Feh!” to them. Joey Ramone, last album before he died: “Don’t Worry About Me.”