Community Essay : Fear: ‘A Prison of My Own Making’ : Violent crime is down, but crime news is everywhere. Only by resisting the hype can we believe the best about others.

The Scene: It is late on a Friday night in a shabby neighborhood in Long Beach. A woman alone in a station wagon slows for a stop sign on a dimly lit street. A dozen or so young men, perhaps gang members, mill around the corner she is approaching. She stomps on the gas. The young men chase the car, banging on it and yelling. Her hands tighten on the steering wheel as she envisions being dragged from the car and attacked. Then she hears their words: They are warning that she is going the wrong way on a one-way street. She turns around and drives unharmed onto the freeway.

I was that fearful woman. Now I wonder why was it automatic to assume that those teens were going to hurt me rather than to believe that they meant me good? Is my life at less risk--or more--when I assume the worst about my neighbor?

Given the crime reports, it’s no wonder I feel scared: A mail bomb kills an advertising executive. A department store worker is convicted of the slaying of an 8 year old. But is there really mayhem in the heart of every stranger or are hysterical perceptions scaring me--and a lot of Americans--to death? According to the FBI, crime is declining. For the first six months of 1994, violent crime--defined as murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery--dropped 4% nationwide, continuing a trend that began in 1993. Yet in a Gallup Poll last August, Americans ranked crime as the most important problem facing the nation.

Back in 1990, FBI statistics showed an 11% rise in violent crime. But Americans were more concerned with the growing conflict in the Persian Gulf and recession. A Gallup Poll in November of that year ranked crime below Iraq, the economy, the federal budget deficit, drug abuse, poverty and unemployment. My fellow Americans even ranked crime below “Don’t know.”

Part of the reason for our fear today is the sheer quantity of news. When I was growing up, we had a half hour each of local and national news each day. Now we have local television news almost hourly in the evening, plus morning shows, late night news, tabloids, prime-time news magazines and Cable News Network around the clock.

That’s a lot of time to sell, and crime sells. So the more gruesome the crime, the more likely it seems that we have a minicam or radio reporter live at the scene. But another part of the problem is that we fail to look behind the headlines at the huge discrepancy between what gets reported and the reality of our own lives. For every person who is murdered in any fashion, be it a carjacking or drive-by shooting or a jealous lover, there are 10,000 people to whom that didn’t happen. For every act of violence, there are scores of what one bumper sticker calls “random acts of senseless kindness” like the young men in Long Beach who kept me from a possible head-on collision.

Fifty years ago, in a world far more dangerous than our own, Anne Frank looked on from a tiny attic tomb and wrote a remarkable journal of life. For two years she lived in constant fear of those whose hatred would cause her death. And yet she could write, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

It takes stubborn courage to believe the best about others in a fear-driven world. Occasionally, that trust may prove hollow or even deadly. But the alternative is to live a life of media-hyped anxiety, cut off from people. I am not willing to sentence myself to a prison of my own making.