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As evolved as we humans have become, in general we still let our hard-wired instincts take over when deciding what’s risky or scary. The 24-hour news channels and local TV networks are happy to play along. Nowhere is this more true than with foreign travel, where the perception of risk based on some long-ago incident trumps any logic or common sense when it comes to assessing risk based on real statistics and facts. Our nightly news is all blood, robberies, and mayhem, yet we worry about going to a foreign country because we heard about a minivan full of tourists getting robbed on a mountain road two years ago.
A recent article in The Nation says this problem is widespread in our culture, across risk factors. We systematically overestimate the likelihood of rare events, such as plane crashes or terrorist acts, while paying no mind to routine hazards such as car crashes, bathtub head whacks, or ATV accidents. (Never mind heart disease from smoking and being obese.) “Over the past ten years there have been just over 1,000 fatalities on United States airplanes, out of more than 100 million departures. That’s one fatality for every 100,000 flights, and that includes the deaths on 9/11.” Yet millions happily board a cruise ship, despite the many cruise ship risks of sickness, sinking, or being ripped off at every port.
Now that I have a kid, I can’t help but notice how overanxious every mother out there seems to be about their child being abducted if they’re left alone for more than 30 seconds outside or in a store. Turns out that child sex abuse is actually down 40 percent this decade and more than nine out of ten kids that are abused know their abuser. In other words, turn off the TV, forget the warped strangers, and keep an eye on your relatives.
The article says, “If parents were rational beings, what they’d really worry about is the family car. Auto accidents claim over 40,000 lives a year in the U.S. and continue to be the leading cause of deaths in young children.” The most dangerous place for your kid to be really is in the back seat on the way to soccer practice.
Then there are high school sports. A mother’s fear would assume that the most dangerous sport for injuries is American football or rugby. Guess again. According to the New York Times, “Cheerleading now accounts for more catastrophic spinal and head injuries than all other high school and college sports combined.” All those crazy flips and shoulder stands are worse than tackling and blocking.
And how about those recreational drugs? Again, media hype and emotional demonizing have a big impact on swaying our thoughts away from reality. Pot gets the worst of it, with opponents trying their best to make a mostly harmless drug into something that’s constantly ruining our youth. British medical journal The Lancet asked a group of addiction psychiatrists, police, and legal officials to rate the impact of various drugs according to how harmful they were to society and individuals. “Heroin, cocaine, and barbituates were named the most harmful, but alcohol was fifth on the list and tobacco was ninth.” Those easily beat out marijuana, LSD, anabolic steroids, and Ecstasy. “The current drug classification system is ill-thought-out and arbitrary,” the study’s author says.
So as Flavor Flav said, “Don’t believe the hype!”
Here are some good sources for real travel news.
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