RealClearPolitics – Articles – Worry About the Right Things
Newsrooms are full of English majors who acknowledge that they are not good at math, but still rush to make confident pronouncements about a global-warming “crisis” and the coming of bird flu.
Bird flu was called the No. 1 threat to the world. But bird flu has killed no one in America, while regular flu — the boring kind — kills tens of thousands. New York City internist Marc Siegel says that after the media hype, his patients didn’t want to hear that.
“I say, ‘You need a flu shot.’ You know the regular flu is killing 36,000 per year. They say, ‘Don’t talk to me about regular flu. What about bird flu?’”
Here’s another example. What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When, for “20/20,” I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I’m sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.
Parents don’t know that partly because the media hate guns and gun accidents make bigger headlines. Ask yourself which incident would be more likely to be covered on TV.
This is borderline political, but I thought relavent to our current culture today. We seem to jump on to any “fad” without really looking at it, a good example above being bird flu. Yes, maybe it could have killed a lot of people, but it wasn’t, and the chances of it making the jump to humans and remaining as virulent as it was in birds that was being so hyped by the media was low. The same thing seems to go on in the political arena, i.e. Barak Obama. Here we have a good-looking, clean-cut, articulate black man, and the media goes ga-ga over him. Then we the masses follow suit? Why? Do we really know anything about this mans political leanings or background? Not at the time. We all just jumped on the bandwagon without looking where it was going. Voting is something that has to be done with responsibility, something we as a culture currently seem to lack. You need to know what the person you are voting for stands for, what they believe in, and what they will fight tooth and nail for. A vote should be something like respect, something you have to earn, not buy or glamor from someone.
