[Editor's note: Kevin Morford is on vacation in Central America, and will be taking the week off from "The Bramble Bush". Please enjoy this classic "Bramble Bush" from the past, first published on December 30, 2005]:



     We all face very real threats in our lives. Eventually, we all die from one cause or another. By studying the dangers we face, and by counting the number of people who are actually killed, injured or otherwise affected by different causes, we can arrive at a pretty accurate understanding of the relative degree of risk that we face from the various threats in our lives.

     Insurance companies, for example, employ actuarials whose job is to quantify the number of people who will die or be hurt by or suffer property damage as a result of different categories of danger. Other people who engage in this type of work include epidemiologists, statisticians and emergency planners. In general, the work they do is pretty accurate, and collectively they provide us with valuable information about how to make our lives safer.

     Unfortunately, there are also people who make it their mission to paint a distorted picture of the threats we face. Some people exaggerate a particular type of risk because they want to sell you a product that they claim will protect you against that risk. Many commercial media outlets emphasize violent crime on their front pages, while ignoring or giving scant coverage to dangers that hurt far more people, because they believe crime coverage boosts their share of the market.

     Partly because of these types of misrepresentations, and partly out of a failure to think clearly about the issue, many people have a very distorted understanding of the relative threats they face from different sources.

     Ideally, public policy should be based at least in part upon an accurate assessment of the danger presented by different types of risks. It makes no sense for government to devote massive resources to the prevention of a danger that kills or injures only a small number of people, while giving short shrift to other dangers which kill large numbers of people. There are certainly other factors that need to be looked at when allocating public resources, but accurate risk assessment is an important starting point.

     President Bush and his reactionary buddies are some of the worst purveyors of distorted risk assessments. They want you to be far more afraid of terrorism than of other threats. They have repeatedly raised threat levels while keeping us in the dark about what the threat actually is. They have conjured up the specter of WMDs, which somehow have never materialized. They keep holding themselves out as being the only ones who can keep us safe from the terrorists.

     This should not be a surprise, because over the last eighty years or so, the GOP has traditionally relied upon fear of enemies to bolster its political fortunes. For many years the enemy was communism. When that enemy went away, they thrashed around until they decided the enemy was narcoterrorism. But people never really felt very afraid of
narcoterrorists, because they mostly killed each other. Before the current President Bush came into office, many of the officials now in his administration openly wished for a new Pearl Harbor so that they could have an enemy to unite the country in support of their reactionary policies. Osama Bin Laden, a terrorist created by the Reagan administration, was only too happy to oblige, and the fear mongers got their wish.

     Terrorism is one of the most over-hyped dangers of the current era. I do not mean that terrorism never takes place; it obviously does. I mean that the risk that a U.S. citizen will be injured or killed by terrorism is minuscule compared with many of the other risks that we all face. In the United States, the highest total number of deaths from terrorism in one year took place in 2001, primarily from the attacks of September 11. Fewer than 3,000 people died from terrorism in that year, and that was an anomalously high number. In most years, the number has been far lower than that.

     I don’t mean to minimize the grief of the surviving family and friends, but those deaths should be kept in perspective. The number of people murdered by ordinary street crime in the United States is about 16,000 per year. Annual deaths from automobile accidents in the United States number over 40,000. Unintentional deaths of all types (accidents) total over 100,000 per year in the United States. Cancer kills over half a million Americans each year, while heart disease kills nearly 700,000 of us. According to a 2003 medical report entitled Death by Medicine, over 780,000 people in the United States die every year from medical errors. All of those deaths cause grief for surviving family members and friends. If you chart the real causes of death and injury in this country, terrorism is one of the least common causes.

     The money and other resources that have been spent to fight terrorism are vastly disproportionate to the actual scope of the threat. Far more lives would be saved, and injuries prevented, if more of the money and resources were devoted to making us safe from other much deadlier and more common dangers. Far from making us safer, the diversion of resources into the fight against terrorism is causing elevated numbers of unnecessary deaths right here at home.

     This does not mean that we should stop trying to prevent terrorism. It means that we should reintroduce some sense of proportionality into our allocation of public resources. We should focus our efforts on the areas where we can do the most amount of good. We will do a lot better if we get rid of the fear mongers, and base our public policy on accurate risk assessment.

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