You’re Much More Likely to Lose Your Head Than Your Life

What scares you more? A friend was asking. Was it the shocking loss of innocence on the shores of paradise in Bali? Or the dread of a serial killer who could brazenly circle our nation’s capital?

Oh my, oh my. Every day is Halloween, the whole world crawling with deranged goblins.

Actually, if I was rational about danger, I’d be far more worried about the 228 gang murders that occurred in Los Angeles in the first seven months of the year -- 61% of all homicides in the city, killings that took down plenty of random innocents as well as those targeted, who may or may not have been innocent themselves.

“Mama, how come Daddy was killed?” Small headlines for a big question.

Perhaps I could slink into a corner and draw up my knees at the horror of the daily commute. Extrapolating from past years, we can calculate that about 34,000 Americans have randomly perished on the highways so far this year, give or take. And 7,362 or so of us have been killed in accidental falls -- as in falling off ladders or out of bed or slipping on banana peels. About 400 of us have died so far in 2002 from nothing more sinister than eating hot dogs, sub sandwiches and cheese contaminated with listeria. An additional 250 have drowned in the bathtub, and 50 or so people have been violently cut down by wasps and other venomous creatures.

Of course, we aren’t rational about these things. And now that the Information Age has locked horns with the Age of Terrorism, it seems we’re getting less so all the time.

A while back, Americans could wring their hands because their nation had become too callous. Now, if we’d only take a deep breath we would see that we’re too callous and too fearful at the same time.

Terrorism in its many forms, whether school shootings, shopping-center shootings, far-off truck bombings or poison-by-mail, is not just a physical danger but also a rising threat to our mental composure. Lately, I’ve found myself in any number of macabre conversations in which people seem to have slipped their moorings entirely.

I suspect there’s a good chance we’ll drive ourselves nuts long before the maniacs get us. If one was to correlate demographic trends with the headlines, we can imagine a future in which our children will miss out on the enjoyment of ever-increasing life spans because they’ll spend all of their days worried about being killed.

There is temptation here to rant against television news for ginning up our blood pressure. Purely as an experiment, I broke my solemn pledge and turned on cable news for one whole day. But you know where this meditation might lead. TV is a tired old mule to lash. If you cannot bear to thumb the off switch, you probably deserve the mental breakdown that all-news cable is ever more intent on delivering.

And I don’t mean to let my own end of the news business off the hook either. Novelty is one thing, but increasingly I wonder what happened to the old goal of trying to put the world into perspective for people?

The military was called out in the hunt for the Washington-area sniper. Legions of shrinks were prettied up with pancake to face the cameras and tell us how to hold our families together, providing “balance” to the programming determined to see us fall apart.

And when, inevitably, journalists recognized they had laid it on a little thick, then over-coverage became another development in the story to cover. Clever, eh?

The consequence of this kind of attention and the resulting anxiety contagion is self-evident. Terrorists prosper and multiply. The whacked-out homicidal loonies we grow at home, as well as those berserk religious fanatics that come at us from abroad, simply cannot kill enough of us -- not with anthrax in the mail, random bullets, hijacked airplanes or vehicles stuffed with explosives. They cannot move events by carnage alone. They need our help. They have to count on us to lose our heads.

That’s the victory they seek.