Between Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano and the oil slick in the Gulf, everybody seems to have disasters on the brain lately. Some of it stems from the nonstop global media coverage, while a good portion relates to our growing awareness of climate change. But a lot of this heightened anxiety is simply misplaced. We don't live in an increasingly dangerous world, whether you're talking wars, terrorism, disasters -- or just the weather. In fact, we live in the safest times yet known to humanity. We just choose not to see it that way for a variety of reasons.
First, we love to blame our leaders for everything, preferring fantastic tales of dark conspiracies to honest descriptions of prosaic failures -- whether theirs, ours, or the system's. The bigger the screw-up, the more some people desperately need to believe that the U.S. government planned it all! Why? They prefer that simplistic belief to the real-world complexity of events and their causality. They like their "angry God" to be as close as possible. ...