ENDURING MONKEY POX
WHILE SWIMMING WITH SHARKS
by Forrest Church
June 15, 2003
Well, my friends, just when you thought it one day might be safe to consider rescheduling your canceled vacation to Toronto, you open the paper to discover that some fellow in Connecticut for goodness sake has contracted Monkey Pox. How in the world are you going to make it through the summer without having your life destroyed by Monkey Pox? Fortunately, I will tell you, in this morning’s sermon, which I have given the late breaking title: "Enduring Monkey Pox while Swimming with Sharks." It is part of an occasional series of sermons I am preaching on the subject of fear.
Not only is a little knowledge a dangerous thing; it can also be a frightening thing. This makes fear perfect fodder for the internet. Distributing fear factoids to a public already prone to being spooked by its own shadow, web sites on everything from earthquakes to bed lice spam the internet. My favorite of these pokes fun at fear (at least I think that’s what it’s doing). Dedicating its pages to "questioning the wisdom of FDR’s statement daily," Fear.com suggests that many things are more frightening than fear itself.
Here is how Fear.com works. Participants submit their favorite fears and an interactive public (tens of thousands of us) votes on whether it shares these fears or not. Submitted fears run the gamut from crickets to smallpox, from global warming to one person’s fear that our planet is getting colder (hundreds agree). Judging from the number of votes cast–more often pro than con–fear.com has tapped a nerve. Among the more popular fears are these:
• anyone can terrorize the country if they’re smart enough
• someone is watching you all the time
• abundant electromagnetic radiation is slowly killing me
• pretty soon everything will in some way cause cancer
To the extent that visitors to fear.com end up laughing at their own silliness, the site has value. But entertaining fears is dangerous. Reading that others are afraid of standing in front of a microwave will plant a cautionary note somewhere in your brain, even if you suspect their fear is groundless. The next time you stand in front of a microwave, some overzealous sentinel–not even a member of your own army–will blast his tinny little trumpet in alarm. "That’s nonsense," you say to yourself. But a part of you wonders. It wants you to step back. It wants to protect you from getting zapped.
The most frightening fear I found among the hundreds listed on Fear.com is "that Fear.com is a metaphor for life." Though obviously tongue in cheek, this cautionary note contains just enough truth to make it unsettling. Judging from the thousands of deadly serious sites dedicated to fears such as the ones people confess to on Fear.com, anyone who may be frightened that the "the internet will be the next target of terrorism" is way behind the times. Every form of media feeds the fear frenzy; all it takes is a new microbe and a good graphic artist. But the internet abets terror in a targeted way. We select the one thing that frightens us most, do a global search, and gain instant access to hundreds of virtual petri dishes in which to culture our fear.
I don’t mean to make light of real terrorism. But here, too, fear itself can be more frightening than its object. We fulfill every terrorist’s fondest dream when we compound the terror he might actually inflict by placing into his hands the weapon of our own imagination. Describing the impact of terrorism on the nation’s psyche, one business writer underscored fear’s cost by rescripting a well-known television commercial. "Duct tape: $7.50; Plastic sheeting: $17.95; damage to the American economy: incalculable."
Fear wreaks havoc on more than just our pocketbooks. It undermines our health and mental equilibrium as well. Scientific studies document how worry eats away at the body while it gnaws at the mind. Admittedly, such research does give us one perfectly rational reason to feel anxious: Anxiety is a killer. It raises blood pressure, adds to one’s level of stress, and measurably shortens life expectancy.
Severe anxiety is a medical condition, known in popular parlance as anxiety disorder and susceptible perhaps to corrective medication or psychotherapy. When you separate them out, many of those little frets and worries that upholster an anxious mind actually fall under the rubric of why I call (aware of the irony) rational fear. Rational fear feeds on the imagination. An overheated imagination gets wind of and then multiplies potential hazards, directing our thoughts to things that might imaginably happen to imperil or diminish our lives.
My personal fear of terrorism peaks when I am standing near the end of a seemingly endless line at the airport waiting to be strip-searched. On such occasions, among the things that frighten me most are these: armed guards, who, though there to protect me, instruct my mind to gird for danger; elaborate security systems that almost beg a real criminal to beat them while the rest of us are unbuckling our pants and waiting for our shoes; red-circled pictures of guns, bombs, and poison with a slash cutting through them.
Is there a danger of terrorists hijacking the airplane I am about to board? Yes. Is that danger in any way considerable? No. In fact, it is statistically far less likely than the danger of my cab being totaled on the way to the airport, or the danger that I might be sideswiped by a drunk driver while hailing it. Enhanced airport security–the very thing that makes me nervous–is in place precisely to ensure that terrorists will have a much harder time hijacking my airplane than ever before. Yet my fear grows in response to this security, rather than diminishing. By definition, rational fear is remarkably irrational.
De Becker defines the word, safe, as "free of acceptable risk." In other words, anyone who is dead runs no risk of being killed. As if this were not irony enough, one can be perfectly safe and still be gripped by fear. One must never underestimate just how irrational rational fear can be. Slap a shark on the cover of People magazine, and even people who live (and summer!) in Nebraska will buy it on impulse, certain to feel that precious pang of vulnerability when flipping through its pages.
Sharks make great fear copy. Merciless, beady, dagger eyes. Multiple rows of sharp, crooked, serrated teeth. Not to mention the specter of a single fin cutting through the water, death’s instrument itself gliding stealthily beneath the surface, a torpedo-like black shadow homing in on its next helpless target–which could be you! It doesn’t take much to start a national shark panic: an unexpected attack, say, or a brilliant, chilling movie. We don’t experience shark panics every summer; to keep fresh, fear alternates its copy. But every decade or so–with no greater reason than might have been mustered the summer before–sharks capture the headlines during August’s dog days. How dangerous are sharks? Not very, in the scale of things. Millions fewer people are killed every year by sharks than by malaria infected mosquitoes (the actual ratio is approximately a million to one). If you choose not to swim in the ocean, the likelihood that you will be attacked by a shark slips from almost nil (say, the same odds you have of winning fifty million dollars in the lottery) to zero.
During the summer of 2001, right before 9/ll, America went through one of its periodic shark obsessions. Five shark fatalities were recorded in all 2001, down seven from the year before. The odds are thirty times greater that one will be struck by lightening than killed by a shark. Yet, by late August, the nation was all in a dither. Time Magazine devoted its cover to this terror, giving rise to the moniker, "Summer of the Shark." Though immediately forgotten in the wake of real drama two weeks later, television specials from CNN to Soledad O’Brien’s talk show and newspaper reports from the front lines of Miami to land-locked Pittsburg and all points West chronicled the unfolding drama for an apparently transfixed public. USA Today assembled an unintentionally hilarious list of helpful tips, "What you should do repelling an attacking shark." First item on the list: "don’t try to pry open its jaws. More than likely, you will get bitten."
Looking back through the dust of 9/11, it is embarrassing to recall wasting any emotional energy whatsoever on the danger posed by sharks the week before true terror struck. But fear will always find its object. Lacking something worthy of our fear, the human imagination will fix on anything, however miniscule the danger it may pose. Fear will equip its public with 3-D glasses and project its manufactured monster on a huge screen for all to cower at. We seem to prefer monsters, however distant, whose menace is beyond our control, perhaps because such monsters allow us the luxury of being victims. When there is nothing we can do but cower, it takes us off the hook.
In contrast, the threat of terrorism is more worthy of our fear and does demand action–even the most eloquent form of action, entailing sacrifice–in response. Nonetheless, even when we think we’ve met a monster worthy of our imagination, the mind cannot resist magnifying it. People who now have a lifetime supply of duct tape have succeeded in terrorizing themselves more than they have in protecting themselves from terror. "The Summer of the Shark" remains a blinking red light, at which we should pause whenever we begin to get terrified, even by things that present demonstrated danger. We can respond most effectively if we are not paralyzed. And we are less likely to be paralyzed if we place our fears in context.
Part of the reason that sharks–and terrorists for that matter–are so frightening to us, is that we have built up a higher tolerance for familiar risks than we have for fresh or exotic ones. Even something exotic, like the West Nile virus, appears to have had a short fear shelf life. By its third summer, people were still dying of it, but, today discounting the now familiar danger as a marginal one, we pay the threat it poses to our safety less (and more appropriate) mind.
If familiarity raises our tolerance for things that can prove dangerous (automobiles, say, or jaywalking in New York City), this is because we build up trust in things we experience as acceptably safe. I probably shouldn’t jaywalk, but I am a New Yorker and jaywalking is one of the things that we New Yorkers do. I would estimate having jaywalked about three thousand times in my life (more times even than my wife has jaywalked over the past three months). Yet, that I have never been hit by a car is, statistically, not the least bit remarkable. The odds of my getting killed jaywalking are miniscule. But not as miniscule as the odds of my being killed by a terrorist. Even if terrorism in the United States should quadruple from its incidence as averaged over the past ten years and including 9/11, the national danger of dying from anthrax, smallpox, e-coli, dirty bombs, hijacked airliners, and riacin combined, will remain ten times lower than the odds of being killed by a car while crossing or walking down the street.
Given how dangerous life is, we might profitably take time out from our shark, terrorist, and mugger fantasies to give at least glancing attention to the fact that, somehow, none of the millions of dangerous things that lurk in life’s shadows waiting to end our lives has yet actually managed to do so. One day this will happen, whether we worry about it in advance or not. Trap doors do finally swing, and roofs cave in. In the meantime, however, the most frequent injuries we suffer are psychological. Rational fear can lead to full-blown phobia, where the fear reflex is dragooned into service of an inner obsession, which triggers the same response that an overpowering outer stimulus does with physical fear. "We have met the enemy and he is us," Pogo said. Spurred by our own fears, we terrorize ourselves. The only stalkers most of us will ever need to worry about skulk about within the recesses of our mind. Worrying about what finally may get us is to die a thousand deaths before our appointed time.
That we are more likely to be frightened of things we can do nothing about than dangers we could actually take some meaningful action to avoid compounds the irrationality of rational fear. The same person who cancels an international vacation because she is frightened that someone might hijack her plane may smoke cigarettes, drink too much, and drive without her seatbelt fastened. The mortal odds posed by these actions (which she rarely thinks twice about) are exponentially greater than those posed by the thing she fears. Not only that, but she could lower them in a instant if she chose to. If she were to buckle up for safety, stop smoking, and restrict herself to one or two drinks a day, her life– together with those of her fellow passengers through life–would be markedly less in jeopardy.
Forget for a moment about the morality involved in such decisions. Think of it instead as enlightened self-interest. If she did these things, rationally speaking, she would have less to fear.
People do get killed jaywalking. And they get killed by terrorists. The goal in life is not to be free of acceptable risk: that goal is irrational and self-defeating, destroying our lives in order to protect them. A truly rational approach would be to weigh risk proportionally in every given instance and then act accordingly. Nine times out of ten, rational fear (by which our minds conger up the specter of things that might imperil our safety and then convince us to protect ourselves from them) is patently irrational. Working overtime in this manner, our imaginations accrue no measurable advantage to their employer.
One final word about rational fear. Marcel Proust observed that "only that which is absent can be imagined." Anytime we are frightened of something that might happen to us, we can be assured of only one thing: it hasn’t. Rationally, rational fear should remind us that the very thing we are conscious of being afraid of at any given moment poses no present danger, for it doesn’t yet exist. You won’t find this message included on fear.com or in any of fear’s compelling modern advertisements. The reason is simple. Once you get it, you’ll be that much more reluctant to purchase a timeshare from one of fear’s salesmen and vacation with imaginary sharks.
Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all.