Perspective

Two recent events reminded me of the dimension of perspective.  One was international and the other local.  Perspective is a dimension with two closely related facets:  the ability to separate the important from the trivial and gratitude, an appreciation of what we have.

The first example was the announcement in the USA Today that the President would be recalling the troops sent to Liberia to help with the Ebola outbreak, “as infection rates there fall to near zero.”  Wasn’t it just a few months ago when we were facing dire warnings of a worldwide spread of the disease?  In September the World Health Organization (WHO) joined with those predicting that the “numbers will continue to climb exponentially, and more than 20,000 people will have been infected by early November.”  By November, in fact, the number of cases was falling.  In the face of the alarm some people canceled vacations to Kenya and other West African countries, thousands of miles away, apparently because they were both located in Africa.  All this panic was over a disease less contagious than measles and influenza, some of the diseases people calmly decide to skip the immunizations for themselves and their children.

The lesson here is that there are only so many things we have time to be scared of.  The evening news and on-line sites are filled with potentially upsetting stories about a crisis here and a crisis there, or the spread of a dreaded disease.  Social media carries warnings of any number of dangers to our families, some of which, like non-organic food, people have been living with for centuries.  These are hyped for headline value or circulated to reinforce beliefs, valid or not, of the senders.  The truth is we don’t have time to react to it all!  Only a couple of weeks ago some folks were hopping mad about football inflation.  Get a grip!

The second incident appeared on my neighborhood website where various local residents were exchanging information about garage door repair and collecting recommendations on reliable vendors.  One neighbor reported that their garage door was broken and “we have had to manually open and close our garage door for about a month now and it is a pain in the rear.”  Wow, what hardship!  Perhaps they should have gotten it fixed sooner.  Perhaps, while they were waiting, they could appreciate the fact that they have a garage and don’t have to brush the snow off or scrape the windshield every morning before leaving.  There are many who still do.  Possibly they are too young to remember when everyone who was lucky enough to have a garage had no choice but to raise and lower the door by hand.  Again, get a grip!

We are so well off in America that sometimes we have to search for things to complain or worry about.  Let’s appreciate that for a moment.

What Are You Afraid Of?

A couple of weeks ago USA Today ran a summary of the results of a Chapman University survey asking people what they were afraid of on a personal level.  The top 5 were:  walking alone at night, becoming the victim of identity theft, safety on the Internet, being the victim of a mass/random shooting and public speaking.  They went on to point out that “crime was rated at the high levels of fear, despite the fact that violent crime has been on the decline in the past 20 years.”  When it comes to fear we are often not rational.

Take Ebola as an example.  This article from one day later tells of the Ebola panic spreading across the nation.  This based on just four cases and one death, but driven by the “increased media spotlight."  The scientific term for this is Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon referring to “how once we learn about something new, we start thinking that we see or hear it everywhere.”  People are more fearful of Ebola than they are of the more common diseases like the annual flu that kills about 30,000 Americans per year and leads to untold amounts of economic loss as adults miss work and children miss school. 

Meanwhile they shun the flu vaccine for reasons based on rumors and personal beliefs rather than on any real science.  Many just refuse to be vaccinated:  “Flu vaccine coverage in the 18- to 64-year-old group in November 2013 was estimated at about 34%, compared with about 41% in children and 62% in those 65 and older.”  In 2013 it was found to be 61% effective and this year’s estimate is 70% to 90%.  A shot that people skip for various reasons, many unfounded, can keep most of us healthy.

But the media attention (along with Twitter and Facebook) focuses on Ebola (just as it did on ISIS in September, unaccompanied minors from Central America in July, and Russia invading the Crimea before that – remember the Crimea?).  When are we going to stop trusting the media, and rightly expect them to over-hype each crisis as it comes along?  They’ve got news to sell; balanced information is just a rare byproduct.  When are we going to stop making medical decisions based on undocumented evidence and opinions on social media?  They have no more expertise than we do, often just a friend or relative who tried a weird cure and got better – sometimes it just happens, but it’s not science and it may not even be safe.

We must start thinking for ourselves, doing the research and being skeptical.  I couldn’t look for a better endorsement of this than one from John McWhorter, Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University, as he writes about what languages do and don’t tell us about the people who use them.  “(Skepticism) is certainly a keystone to sophisticated thought.  It would not be inappropriate to even state, for general purposes, that skepticism – that is applying one’s mind to taking the measure of things before coming to judgment – is the heart of intelligence.”  (Source: The Language Hoax, p. 41.)

If we do the homework we will find not only what we should be scared of and what are figments of our own or other people’s imaginations, but also what we should be doing to avoid the real dangers.  The CDC lists below the top five causes of death in the US and what behaviors will help us reduce the risk of each.

"Modifiable risk factors are largely responsible for each of the leading causes of death:

• ·      Heart disease risks include tobacco use, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, poor diet, overweight, and lack of physical activity.
• ·      Cancer risks include tobacco use, poor diet, lack of physical activity, overweight, sun exposure, certain hormones, alcohol, some viruses and bacteria, ionizing radiation, and certain chemicals and other substances.
• ·      Chronic respiratory disease risks include tobacco smoke, second-hand smoke exposure, other indoor air pollutants, outdoor air pollutants, allergens, and exposure to occupational agents.
• ·      Stroke risks include high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes, overweight, previous stroke, tobacco use, alcohol use, and lack of physical activity.
• ·      Unintentional injury risks include lack of seatbelt use, lack of motorcycle helmet use, unsafe consumer products, drug and alcohol use (including prescription drug misuse), exposure to occupational hazards, and unsafe home and community environments."

Fear is a powerful emotion.  It can affect our health and overall wellbeing.  It can lead to foolish decisions.  As technology and communication get more sophisticated, they can either work for us or against us.  Not trusting everything you read is much safer than marching in step to the drumbeat of the news or social media.  What a waste it is to be afraid of the wrong things because we fail to do the research and to think for ourselves.

Tough Decisions

In 1967 a British philosopher developed a problem, a kind of thought experiment, called the “Trolley Dilemma.”  Since then it has caused much discussion and spawned several variations.  In it you control a switch that will reroute a trolley from the main track onto a spur track.  The trolley is coming, and ahead on the track are five workmen unaware of its approach.  They will surely be killed.  If you pull the switch the trolley will be diverted and you will save the five lives, but the trolley will hit and kill one other workman on the spur track.  What would you do?

In purely utilitarian terms the right answer is to pull the switch.  The choice between five dying and one dying is a pure mathematical decision.  If you were not there, however, the five would be killed with no one to blame, which is the same as doing nothing.  It is reasonable to assume that pulling the switch is the equivalent of killing the single workman.  One variation, which makes it more interesting, replaces the switch with an innocent bystander and asks if it would be ethical to throw him in front of the trolley to save the five.  This usually gives participants more pause than the more mechanical action of just pulling a switch.  Clearly there is no good answer.  It is a test of values.

Now I digress from the original problem.  Let’s replace the one workman on the spur track with a small tree or rose bush.  Despite the fact that shrubs are living things, it makes the decision much easier.  Even if it was a very rare or a endangered species of rose bush, the problem becomes a no-brainer – you save the people.

As a next step I replace the rose bush with a box of spiders or garter snakes.  These are living animals that benefit us by eating insects, but few would feel squeamish or hesitate to kill the spiders to save the five workmen.  The decision is still simple.

Moving on, I continue the escalation by changing the unaware target from spiders to an ugly, smelly or otherwise unpopular mammal like a rat, mole or skunk.  At this point, or perhaps even at the last stage, some far-out animal rights advocates would object.  They argue that the rat or skunk has exactly the same right to life as a human and the problem has regressed to the original moral choice.  Most of us, though, would not agonize over the choice between killing a rat or skunk vs. allowing five workmen to die – even if it required actually throwing the box of rats rather than just pulling a switch.

At what point then does each of us cross the line?  At what point does the majority cross the line and declare that there is no difference from the original problem?  At what point does the majority allow themselves to be bullied, badgered or worn down, succumbing with indifference to passive acceptance of someone else’s value system?

Do some say it is identical to the original situation if we must balance five human lives against that of a cute bunny, a baby seal or a brown-eyed doe?  How about a puppy or kitten?  Pets can become like part of the family.  We become very attached to them, but by replacing the one workman, a human stranger, in the original problem with our family pet could it ever put the choice into the same ethical category?  (Remember, I wrote previously about a family that tried to refuse entry into a tornado shelter to another family because it would mean putting their dog outside and in danger.)

This is the kind of question I wonder about when I read about people demonstrating to save the life of a dog belonging to an Ebola patient.  The NY Times science reporter tells us that dogs can contract Ebola and can even be carriers without showing symptoms.  Are the demonstrators disregarding this information, or are they making the ethical choice of not pulling the switch because the value the life of a pet equals that of one or more human beings?  I suspect it is neither; they just have good intentions and are going with their instincts.  But is everyone afraid to even question such a decision so as to not appear as cold-hearted and cruel?  Don’t we want those who are protecting our health to try to make the difficult, logical decisions, whatever those are, rather than follow the easy politically popular path?