You can’t allay fear with statistical analysis

  • Ellen Goodman / Boston Globe columnist
  • Saturday, October 20, 2001 9:00pm
  • Opinion

BOSTON — I guess my sense of humor has returned — In a bleak sort of way. Last night, I laughed at a slightly battered sign in my neighborhood warning about West Nile virus.

At least that anxiety has been reduced to the size of, well, a mosquito, in the wake of the towering catastrophe and its trail of dread.

Before September 11 anyone who had worried about three planes flying into buildings would have been immediately diagnosed as paranoid. Now we’re having a hard time telling the difference between the paranoid and the prepared.

Bought a gas mask on eBay? Conned your doctor into prescribing Cipro? Worried about the vulnerability of air, water, food? Trying to figure out which lace to tie to stop the other shoe from dropping on your head? Some folks have adopted the crouch as their national yoga position.

We’re not getting much help from our leaders, either. Tommy Thompson tells us to be calm "but on the lookout for mysterious health symptoms." John Ashcroft says not to panic but "be vigilant." George W. Bush says Americans should go about their business but "with a heightened sense of awareness that a group of barbarians have declared war on the American people."

Meanwhile, if you want to see what we have to fear from fear itself think of the disturbed young man who stormed the cockpit of an American Airlines flight the other day, ranting that the devil was flying the plane into the Sears Tower.

Terror is the ism of the moment. By its very definition, this terrorism is unpredictable, random and generic enough to deliberately send our fantasies spinning into endless circles.

Produce small pox vaccines and any bioterrorist watching can switch to botulism. Think the planes a problem? Maybe they’ll target the train. Worried about cities and high-rises? As humorists at The Onion say, "Security Beefed Up at Cedar Rapids Public Library."

Once you get started there’s no end. At times the urge to protect ourselves against terrorism seems a bit like fighting bacteria with an antibiotic. The bacteria keep evolving.

I’m not ridiculing the worried-well. I’m one of them, with a canceled vacation to prove it. I don’t think it’s always possible to allay fear with a statistical analysis. Nor do I disparage fear as emotional. It is an emotion.

In the past few days of allaying my fear the old fashioned way — work therapy — I’ve talked to a lot of folks who know about the shared, cross-cultural, even genetic roots of anxiety. We are more afraid, says David Ropeik at Harvard’s Center for Risk Analysis, when the risk is new, more afraid of a catastrophic risk than a chronic one, more afraid of a truly dreadful death than a relatively benign one.

"We react to risk with our hearts and genes and emotions, not the facts," says Ropeik. Bingo. He adds, "We are genetically hard-wired to fear first and think second." Double bingo.

Fearing first, many pick their own security blanket from the endless options. Thinking second, we find out that a gas mask must be individually fitted and constantly worn. Thinking second, there’s no antibiotic to fit all biological weapons.

But the real problem comes when we project our fears into policies. If one person’s gas mask is just a folly, 275 million gas masks are a dangerous misuse of limited resources.

The newly formed Office of Homeland Security is going to have the job of second thoughts. After they pinpoint the glaring security lapses — welcome to Boston’s Logan Airport — they’ll get down to the tougher political job of analyzing risks in a democracy and choosing the right items from the smorgasbord of anxieties.

Thinking second, they’ll not only have to beef up the public health service’s ranks instead of the public library’s door. They’ll have to distinguish between the security we can shore up and the risks we have to live with. That’s going to be hard in a democracy that once pinpointed mosquitoes as an awesome danger and sharks as public enemy No. 1.

Gradually, America will get back to "normal." It’s uncomfortable to live in a crouch. But it’s also dangerous to worry about the wrong things.

Already a California news station has broadcast a report on coyotes in a schoolyard. A Cleveland company recalled a cleaning fluid that didn’t have a safety cap.

But in this new world, thinking has to catch up with fear, or our security will end up sounding as hollow as the car alarms that still go off in one of the parking garages at Ground Zero.

Ellen Goodman can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or send e-mail to EllenGoodman@Globe.com.

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