Kat Dancing

We watched "Bowling for Columbine" last night. Two words: watch it.

It made me cry. It also made me think. One of the major points of the movie was *fear*: how scared Americans are. Of *everything*. Robbers. Rapists. Muggers. Jellyfish. Getting the flu. Terrorists. Drug users. Their own children.

This is disturbingly true. Going abroad kind of pinpointed that one for me... over there I was doing stuff - sleeping on park benches, hitchhiking, striking up conversations with strange drunk men in lonely, deserted train stations, walking home alone at night - that the Kiwis or the Brits would lecture me mildly about, and probably rightly. But they were more amused than anything.

Over here I get shock and awe because I, a female, traveled alone. And also lectures about how deeply dangerous that is, graphic descriptions of the things that could have been done to me, and almost inevitably the conclusion - delivered in a righteous tone of voice, usually - "Well, you were lucky. *I* wouldn't take those sorts of risks."

I mean, come on! Yes, travelling alone was probably dangerous (although less dangerous than, say, being in a car, statistically speaking.) So? *Everything* is dangerous. That doesn't mean I'm going to sit on my butt for the rest of my life.

But what's striking isn't the danger; as I say, everything is dangerous. It's the sense of proportion. *Especially* about crime. It is much, much less likely that you will be shot, raped, mugged, or killed than that you will be sent through your windshield by some drunk the next time you go for a spin, but people who will happily jump in their DeathTrapMobile every day are terrified to walk down an empty street. Particularly if there are ethnic minorities or homeless people about. Why?

One factor is the media. A nice statistic thrown off in "Bowling for Colombine" was that, in a period of time when murders have decreased by 20%, media coverage of murders had increased by 600%. I'm willing to bet that the statistics for rape and violence against women are just as ridiculous. Moreover, I'd love to see the breakdown of stranger-attacks versus "date rapes". I know that most - I don't have the statistic, but well over 50% - rapes and assults come from someone the victim knows, but when was the last time you heard one of those covered on TV? No, they're all of women attacked by strangers in back alleys... an occurrance which is the rarest of rare of all rapes.

It would be wonderful to blame the media for everything, but unfortunately there's another, more insidious, factor at work. Control. I heard an interesting tidbit on NPR a while back about this. Even people who know that cars are *much* more dangerous than airplanes will say that they feel safer in a car - because they can control the car. Similarly, something like crime is frightening because it is uncontrollable. and so people will invest in something that makes them feel they have control - eg, a gun - even if they *know* it is much, much, much more likely that the gun will be used to kill a member of their own family.

So we're conditioned to fear the uncontrollable, and gifted with a media and a government and a set of corporations that exaggerate our fears out of proportion to serve their own ends. and the more fear we feel, the less we feel in control. Return to beginning of sentence. Repeat until nice men with straightjacket come for you.

In the meantime my preperations for travelling (alone, I might add) to Toronto continue, and I continue to leave my door unlocked. Unsafe, I'm sure, but oddly I have more peace of mind than most people I know.