The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence (45 page)

A passing car carrying a man and woman slowed to look at Donna, and the man called out an offer of help. Donna waved them on. Very stressed, she got out of her car and ran down the street looking for a service station, along the way adding inventive chapters to the story of her financial ruin. She noticed the same car driving alongside her, but she just kept running. Reaching a pay phone, she called the studio executive’s office and explained she’d be late. As she predicted, they told her the meeting could not be made rescheduled. The career that she envisioned ended in that phone booth.

Donna slumped and started crying just as that same car pulled up slowly toward the phone booth. Even though these people had been following her, she wasn’t afraid. The man stayed in the car while the woman got out and tapped on the glass, saying, “Is that you?” Through tears, Donna looked up to see the face of Jeanette, a friend with whom she’d shared an apartment in college.

Jeanette and her boyfriend rushed Donna to the meeting (she didn’t get the job) and then took her to lunch. Within a few weeks, Donna and Jeanette were partners in a new business of finding art and antiques around the world for resale in America. They became so successful that within two years, Donna had saved enough money to co-finance her first documentary film.

Amid all of Donna’s creative projections when her car broke down, she hadn’t included the possibility that it would lead to a reunion with an old friend with whom she’d form a business that would take her around the world and give her the resources to make her own films.

Few of us predict that unexpected, undesired events will lead to great things, but very often we’d be more accurate if we did. The history of invention is filled with perceived failures that became unpredicted successes (a’la James Watt’s failure to get a pump working and his inadvertent success at inventing the vacuum). I have gotten great benefits from taking the voice of skepticism that I used to apply to my intuition and applying it instead to the dreaded outcomes I imagined were coming. Worry will almost always buckle under a vigorous interrogation.

If you can bring yourself to apply your imagination to finding the possible favorable outcomes of undesired developments, even if only as an exercise, you’ll see that it fosters creativity. This suggestion is much more than a way to find the silver lining our grandmothers encouraged us to look for. I include it in this book because creativity is linked to intuition, and intuition is the way out of the most serious challenges you might face. Albert Einstein said that when you follow intuition, “The solutions come to you, and you don’t know how or why.”

A young man named Andrew had promised to take a much-anticipated date to a particular movie she wanted to see. At first he couldn’t locate a theater showing it, and once he found where it was playing, he couldn’t get tickets. He and the thus-far-unimpressed girl waited in line for a second-choice film, which they learned after forty minutes of standing was also sold out. Andrews’s date was a failure, and his hopes of what young men hope for were dashed. He was, predictably, very disappointed, and he was also annoyed at the hassle of trying to see a film. He did not immediately say to himself, “Maybe this discouraging evening will compel me to develop a new computerized phone-in system through which moviegoers can choose the film they want to see, learn where it’s playing, and actually purchase the tickets in advance.”

But that’s exactly what Andrew Jarecki did, founding MovieFone, (which you may know as 777-FILM) the innovative service used each week by millions of people in cities all over America. (He also married that date.)

Having told so many stories of risk and harm, I share some with more favorable outcomes to make this point: Worry is a choice, and the creative genius we apply to it can be used differently, also by choice. This truth is mildly interesting when the stakes are low, like worrying about a job interview or a date, but in the situations with the highest stakes, this same truth can save your life.

▪ ▪ ▪

I’ve spent much of my career trying to make accurate predictions of which bad thing might happen next. Admittedly, this skill has been a powerful asset, because people are eager to hear forecasts of every possible tragedy. Just one indication of this is the fact that television in large cities devotes as much as forty hours a day to telling us about those who have fallen prey to some disaster and to exploring what calamities may be coming: “NEW STUDY REVEALS THAT CELLULAR PHONES CAN KILL YOU. LEARN THE FACTS AT ELEVEN!” “CONTAMINATED TURKEY DINNER KILLS THREE! COULD YOUR FAMILY BE NEXT!?”

Silly and alarming news promos are of more than passing interest to me because understanding how they work is central to understanding how fear works in our culture. We watch attentively because our survival requires us to learn about things that may hurt us. That’s why we slow down at the scene of a terrible car accident. It isn’t out of some unnatural perversion; it is to learn. Most times, we draw a lesson: “He was probably drunk;” “They must have tried to pass;” “Those little sports-cars are sure dangerous;” “That intersection is blind.” Our theory is stored away, perhaps to save our lives another day.

Ernest Becker explains that “man’s fears are fashioned out of the ways in which he perceives the world.” Animals know what to fear by instinct, “but an animal who has no instinct [man] has no programmed fears.” Well, the local news has programmed them for us, and the audience is virtually guaranteed by one of the strongest forces in nature—our will to survive. Local news rarely provides new or relevant information about safety, but its urgent delivery mimics importance and thus gets our attention, much as someone would if they burst into your home and yelled, “Don’t go outside or you’ll be killed! Listen to me to save your life!” That’s the way local television news works as a business. Fear has a rightful place in our lives, but it isn’t the marketplace.

(On a personal note, even though I have a professional interest in hazard and risk, I never watch the local television news and haven’t for years. Try this and you’ll likely find better things to do before going to sleep than looking at thirty minutes of disturbing images presented with artificial urgency and the usually false implication that it’s critical for you to see it.)

Electronic scare tactics come in several forms. When news is scarce, they march out an update on some old story. You might recall the bizarre kidnapping of a busload of schoolchildren in a California town called Chowchilla. The perpetrators buried the bus—with the children inside—in a massive ditch at a rock quarry. The story ended with the rescue of the twenty-six children and the arrest of the kidnappers. A year later came the update: All the same footage was shown, the original incident was told again in its entirety, and a reporter walked down a Chowchilla street offering this foreboding wrap-up: “But the people of this little town still awaken in the night, worried that it could all happen again.”

They do? Worried that what could all happen again—another mass kidnapping with a busload of their children buried in a rock quarry? I don’t think so. These often ridiculous summaries are used to give news stories significance, or to leave them uncertain and thus open for still further stories, e.g., “Whether more will die remains to be seen.” In the world of local news, frightening stories never end. We rarely hear the words “And that’s that.”

Local news has several favorite phrases, one of which is “Police made a gruesome discovery today in [name of local city].” The satellite age has increased the library of available shocking footage, so that now, if there wasn’t a something grisly in your town, you might hear, “Police made a gruesome discovery today in Reno,” or Chicago, or Miami, or even Caracas. It may not be local, but it is gruesome, and there’s some footage, so what the hell. Whether they go back in time to find something shocking or go around the planet, in neither case is the information necessarily valuable or relevant to your life. Local news has become little more than what
Information Anxiety
author Richard Saul Wurman calls “a list of inexorable deaths, accidents, and catastrophes—the violent wallpaper of our lives.”

I discuss all this here as much more than a pet peeve. Understanding how the television news works and what it does to you is directly relevant to your safety and well-being. First, the fear of crime is itself a form of victimization. But there is a much more practical issue involved: Being exposed to constant alarm and urgency shell-shocks us to the point that it becomes impossible to separate the survival signal from the sound bite. Because it’s sensationalism and not informationalism, we get a distorted view of what actually poses a hazard to us.

Imagine a widely televised report: “Dolphin attacks swimmer!” Such a story would make a new connection in the minds of literally millions of people: Dolphins are dangerous to man (which they are not). Though unusual animal-attack stories are good news fodder, humans are not the favored prey of any predator. (We are somewhat bony, low on meat, and smart as the Dickens.) The point is that your survival brilliance is wasted when you focus on unlikely risks.

Unfortunately, just giving a criminal hazard a name gives it a place in our minds and gives us another reason to feel unwarranted fear of people. Think back to the so-called freeway shootings in Los Angeles. Though television news was full of interviews with motorists pointing out bullet holes in their windshields, the fact is that there were fewer freeway shootings that year than there had been the year before. There was no trend, no rash of attacks, no criminal fad, nothing any different than what had happened before or has happened since. But we don’t hear anything these days about freeway shootings. Are there no more hot days and angry armed motorists stuck in slow traffic? Have freeway shootings really stopped, or have the reports stopped because that story is an episode from last season?

The only real trend is the way local news finds two similar stories with some striking visuals or an overly excited interview, gives the risk a name, and repeats it for a while with different victims. When such a crime succeeds, the local news will tell people how it was done. Thus, supposedly new forms of criminal violence can indeed become fads—through the very same method that other fads do: It’s called advertising.

A serious-looking news celebrity tells of the most current danger we simply must know about to save our lives: “I’m standing at the scene of the latest follow-home robbery to hit this posh west-side neighborhood, part of a growing trend of random attacks. How can you avoid this terror?” This will be followed by a list of cautions, some of them so obvious as to be comical (e.g., “Don’t let strangers into your car”). There will be an interview with someone seriously billed as a “follow-home robbery expert.” Then suddenly one day you’d think such robberies had just stopped, because local television will move on to the next criminal hazard. Soon it will be “Robbers who hide out in your purse until you get home!” followed by a checklist of warning signs to look out for: “Purse feels extra heavy; purse difficult to close; unusual sounds coming from purse…”

Though television news would have us think differently, the important question is not how we might die, but rather “How shall we live?” and that is up to us.

▪ ▪ ▪

In my life and work, I’ve seen the darkest parts of the human soul. (At least I hope they are the darkest.) That has helped me see more clearly the brightness of the human spirit. Feeling the sting of violence myself has helped me feel more keenly the hand of human kindness.

Given the frenzy and the power of the various violence industries, the fact that most Americans live without being violent is a sign of something wonderful in us. In resisting both the darker sides of our species and the darker sides of our heritage, it is everyday Americans, not the icons of big-screen vengeance, who are the real heroes. Abraham Lincoln referred to the “Better angels of our nature,” and they must surely exist, for most of us make it through every day with decency and cooperation.

Having spent years preparing for the worst, I have finally arrived at this wisdom: Though the world is a dangerous place, it is also a safe place. You and I have survived some extraordinary risks, particularly given that every day we move in, around, and through powerful machines that could kill us without missing a cylinder: jet airplanes, subways, busses, escalators, elevators, motorcycles, cars—conveyances that carry a few of us to injury but most of us to the destinations we have in mind. We are surrounded by toxic chemicals, and our homes are hooked up to explosive gasses and lethal currents of electricity.

Most frightening of all, we live among armed and often angry countrymen. Taken together, these things make every day a high-stakes obstacle course our ancestors would shudder at, but the fact is we are usually delivered through it. Still, rather than be amazed at the wonder of it all, millions of people are actually looking for things to worry about.

Near the end of his life, Mark Twain wisely said, “I have had a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

▪ ▪ ▪

You now know a great deal about predicting and avoiding violence, from the dangers posed by strangers to the brutality inflicted on friends and family members, from the everyday violence that can touch anyone to the extraordinary crimes that will touch only a few. With your intuition better informed, I hope you will have less unwarranted fear of people. I hope you’ll harness and respect your ability to recognize survival signals. Most important, I hope you’ll see hazard only in those storm-clouds where it exists and live life more fully in the clear skies between them.