The only thing we have to fear is fear itself
Franklin Roosevelt
What a quaint notion.
I’m told by the New York Times that Obama recently addressed a “jittery” nation. I read elsewhere that more than half of us now want to get ourselves into a another quagmire in the Middle East, because doing so will apparently ease our jitters.
Apparently, we get jittery if Muslims use automatic weapons to kill us, but when white males do so we say a few prayers, bemoan the omnipresence of mental illness, and promptly forget about it. Not a single jitter, really, and yet the victims of the white male are just as dead as the victims of the Muslims, and they die so very much more often.
I’m not at a total loss to explain my own lack of jitters. At least I have a theory. My spouse shares my affliction. We speculated, (alas, I have no scientific basis for this), that our jitter level is directly proportional to our consumption of non-print media. That consumption being zero, we are not exposed to the constant barrage of media coverage of these events, the subtext of which is that we should all be very jittery indeed. Fear itself is now a very good thing. We are encouraged to be fearful by the media; law enforcement types; politicians (mostly Rs, but some Ds); and presidential candidates of only one stripe. We are an impressionable people. Who are we to question such a consensus? If they say we should be jittery, then we do as we are told, despite what math may tell us about the odds of being killed by a Muslim as opposed to, say, a white male. If that means taking precisely the actions most likely to increase killings by Muslims (the white male killings will go on of course, but that’s just background noise), then we must take that action now. After all, what could go wrong?
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