Frankie (and Bart) says, ‘Relax’

I did not, I repeat, did not get carjacked on the way to work today. As far as I know, nobody tried to shoot me or stab me or harm me in any other way. I was not intentionally rear-ended by someone hoping to steal my car, rob me or rip me off in some incredibly complex insurance scam. And I managed to make it all the way through the parking lot and into the office without anyone gassing me with ether disguised as a perfume sample with the goal of doing things to my unconscious body best not mentioned in a family paper.

Now all I have to worry about is ax murderers in my back seat or whether someone has spent the day laying in wait under my car intent on slashing my Achilles with a straight razor.

In the words of the great Ice Cube - for my money the finest of the frozen water-monikered rappers - it was a good day, I didn't have to use my AK.

I can imagine there are a few others out there who have had similarly AK-free days. Some of you may have even gone a week or so without being robbed, beaten, bullied or otherwise importuned. There may even be the lucky soul or two who have survived the entire month without falling prey to some horrific scheme or act of violence, though rare they must be.

I can imagine there are folks out there living lives not plagued by violence or fear, but I can't be certain. You see, there are vary few statistics available concerning the absence of terror in our lives and an increasing deficit in anecdotal evidence. In other words, nobody's talking about the good news anymore.

That's not wholly accurate. There is good news out there if you know where to look. This very paper is absolutely chock-full of stories of excelling students, tireless volunteers and people who can't seem to help but help. The folks who make decisions about what news is covered here and in most of the nation's newsrooms make a conscious effort to balance the day's misery with stories of our better natures. There's still plenty of ugly out there to write about, but I like to think most of us work to keep it in some sort of perspective with the day.

No, it's not we jackals of the traditional media who feed the ennui and angst of the populace, it's you. And frankly, you should be ashamed of yourself.

It's not that there hasn't always been a ready trade in tales of violence and victimhood. The Bible reads like a true crime pulper with its ancient tales of deception and abuse and it probably goes back even further. I'm sure somewhere there are cave paintings depicting some stick-figure Neanderthal being lured into a windowless cave with a story of a lost saber-toothed kitten. Horror and its retelling is in our DNA.

But thanks to technology, a story once passed between housewives over the back fence can now go viral, repeated in a million inboxes a minute by those folks I've come to call "crazy forwarding moms." In the old days, you knew the source of the gossip. If crazy, drunk Jennifer next door told you gypsies were gassing people outside the Rink's store you could write it off as nonsense. Now, the reader has no idea what the tale's genesis might be, so he or she is stuck with the choice of accepting it as truth and being safe or rejecting it at his or her own considerable peril.

The problem with that is the toll "truth" takes. We can believe all the horrifying and disconcerting news we read, see or hear on a daily basis. We can soak it up, spread it around and tell ourselves we're being smart and aware and alert to the terrors that surround us. But by doing that, we pay a pretty terrible price. Fear darkens the soul. It makes us weaker and dumber and capable of doing great evil in the name of pre-emptive defense.

Some soccer mom passes on the story of a man lurking near a school, thinking she's helping keep kids safe. That story grows, as we know it will. Pretty soon, the kids are adding their own fictional spin to it and it ends with a kindly neighbor man beaten or harassed by latte-raging fathers for the unconscionable sin of stopping by to watch kids play.

The truth is, we're safe. In fact, we are as safe as any people have been in the history of mankind. Apparently, we need to be reminded of that.

Sure, horrible things can happen to any of us, but it is incredibly rare. There are parts of our own community where random violence is more likely than in others, and there are decisions we make that can make us more likely to be victims. But if you are among the great majority of us living in a quiet neighborhood, unassociated with bad people, you are very, very safe. Believing otherwise doesn't make you or your family safer, it makes you distrustful and most likely a little mean-spirited.

So relax, add "crazy forwarding mom" to your spam list, and let the kids go out and play. When someone tells you something horrible, be concerned for the victim and thankful it didn't happen to you. Then get in your car and start worrying about real dangers, like gas prices.

Oh, but check for tendon-slashers under your car first. That one might be true.