Author: ctaylor328gmailcom

Have you ever wondered exactly how you will die? Well, I went ahead and found out for you.  You’re going to die of heart disease or cancer.  That’s what people in our country tend to die from – 45.9% of people, according to the CDC.   If it’s not that, it will most likely be some sort of automotive accident, or chronic old-person disease from which you slowly wither away. But both of these are unlikely compared to your likely death from cancer or heart disease.

I know it’s hard to be told that you will die from cancer. Cancer is one of those spooky words that makes everyone sad – and with good reason. I watched my father suffer and die from kidney cancer in 2015, and the fact that almost a quarter of deaths in this country are a result of that hideous illness is unsettling.  But, maybe it won’t be cancer. Maybe you’ll get heart disease, or maybe you’ll commit suicide. I can’t say for sure, especially because this varies tremendously depending on your age and lifestyle. But what I can say with absolute certainty is that you will definitely die someday.

But you know what you won’t die from? Terrorism. You just won’t.  About 3000 people have died total in the last 20 years from events labeled “terrorist”.  That’s not even a hundredth of a percent chance. So that brown guy you’ve been avoiding eye contact with isn’t going to kill you. Statistically, you are far more likely to kill yourself than be killed by a terrorist.

So why are people so afraid of terrorists, if terrorist attacks are so rare?

It’s the same reason we fear lightning and spiders more than we fear careening along the highway at eighty miles per hour (which is also one of the ways that you plausibly could end up dying). As advanced as we are, in many ways we are still beholden to the whims of our ancient brains, and fearing heart disease, cancer, or car wrecks was just not something that improved the likelihood of survival in our ancestors. Fearing outsiders with different skin tones and different languages? That definitely did. So, we have this natural propensity towards xenophobia.

Richard Dawkins has also pointed out, although in support of a different argument, that human beings have terrible intuition about the likelihood of events occurring and overall numeracy in general beyond 100 or so. Our ancestors evolved in villages where counting to 100 was important, but counting to one billion was not. The average person can’t readily estimate risks or odds on a larger scale without actually doing calculations. So, we continue to conjure up the memory of an attack that occurred 16 years ago and live in fear that it will occur again any day now.

Donald Trump exploits that fear in order to garner support for his agenda. He’s not the first president to do so.

We should ask our politicians to help protect us from real threats instead of unlikely nightmare scenarios.

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