Dallas, TX –
It’s getting scary out there.
At least, that’s what the news keeps telling us.
Ebola, war, terrorists, you name it. It’s out there and out to get us.
Or is it?
I’ve got associates who do not want to travel to Dallas right now because a couple of nurses who were caring for a Liberian with Ebola have now come down with the virus.
Let’s ignore how difficult it is to catch.
Let’s ignore the fact that none of the original patient’s family who were sharing an apartment with him as he was getting sicker have come down with it.
No, all that matters is that Ebola is in Dallas, therefore, you don’t want to come here, because it’s lurking around every corner in the city, waiting to infect you.
Come on! Get a grip!
Everyone needs to understand that it’s news because it’s unusual.
There’s the old saying about the news: if it bleeds, it leads.
See, no one is interested in reading about normal life. That’s too normal. It happens to everybody.
Yes, it gives us something to discuss as small talk at the dinner table, or in passing with the neighbors. But no one is going to pay to read it.
Why not?
Because it’s just normal, every day stuff that happens to everybody. That’s just life happening.
No, what gets our attention is the stuff that’s not normal. The freak show, so to speak.
And why does it get our attention?
Because it’s not normal. It’s not what we experience in our daily lives.
And probably partly because we like to be scared.
I mean, just look at the popularity of haunted houses during the month building up to Halloween, or of supposedly scary movies. There was even someone in Dallas this year who decorated their house for Halloween as an Ebola-contaminated site.
We like the adrenaline rush.
But with a movie, or haunted house, the scary stuff has limits. Once the movie is over, we know that the only thing keeping us in that heart-pounding state is our memories of what we just saw, and our imagination putting ourselves in the situation we just witnessed.
But we know it’s not real.
But as for the news, that’s another story. That is real life; it’s not just a story. We get the same adrenaline rush as we imagine it happening to ourselves. It really happened to someone else, someone living just down the street, therefore it could happen to us.
But will it?
The odds are that you are far more likely to die in a car crash than be subject to anything you’ve seen on the news, yet we all get in our cars without hesitation.
Why? In part because it’s familiar, it’s what we know.
Because we get in our cars and drive every day, and most days nothing bad happens to us, we are comfortable with it. We feel safe.
But air one story about a road-rage shooting on a street that we drive every day, and suddenly we don’t feel so safe anymore.
Why? When you think about how many thousands of cars drive down that same street every day, and how the incident was between just two of those, on one day out of many, the chance of that happening to ourselves are very low.
Not quite win the lottery low, but still down there.
But it did happen to someone, so it could happen to us. Just like someone does win the lottery.
Yup, it could happen. But guess what, life is fatal. There’s no getting around it, everyone who lives, dies. It’s guaranteed. The only mystery is when and how.
So why are we so afraid of death? Isn’t that what our various religions are supposed to help with? After all, when a loved one dies, we often say that they’ve gone on to a better place.
But we don’t know. That’s the key. The only people who do know are those that have already died. For the rest of us, it’s a complete unknown, no matter what our religions might tell us.
It’s that same fear of the unknown that keeps many of us from venturing far from home. We fear the unknown, the unfamiliar.
Why? Mostly because it’s unfamiliar. We don’t know what to expect. We see pictures of exotic cultures from the other side of the world, and because it looks so different from what we know, we feel unsure about going and experiencing it.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. It doesn’t matter where you go, people are the same, everywhere. They all have the same wants and desires. The only difference is cultural, the society that they’ve been brought up in.
Well, guess what. We’re all different. Each and every one of us.
Go spend some time with a random family down the street. You’ll find that they’ve got their own set of behaviors and interactions that are different from yours. They have their own set of family rituals that they perform every day that are different from any other family in the neighborhood. Now magnify that from a particular household to a village and add a dozen decades or more and you’ll increase the peculiarity of those idiosyncratic behaviors.
These are what bind us together, and push us apart. It allows us to delineate us, whose cultural rituals are familiar, from them, whose rituals are unfamiliar. Their rituals are not what we’ve grown up with. Not what we are used to.
Too many of us choose not to look beyond the unfamiliar rituals of social life, to see that underneath, we’re all the same. We can choose to cower in fear of the unfamiliar, the unknown, the random, the rare. We can choose to be scared of the world around us. To fear the bogeyman that the news media are using to titillate our amygdala with, and cower in the corner, never wanting to leave our house.
Or we can choose to not be afraid, understanding that it’s news specifically because it’s rare and unusual. The key is to understand that it is a choice.
Featured image adapted from an image by Pascal, used under the Creative Commons license.
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