With experience comes wisdom

Scares are everywhere today and sadly, seem to most panic young people who have the least to fear about their health, food and environment. Older generations have seen countless scares come and go, as each and every one proved to be bogus.

Rather than fall for the next “fear du jour,” Dr. Jay Lehr, Ph.D., science director for The Heartland Institute, has a suggestion for what to do when confronted by those who seem eager to take our money and watch us cower in fear of everything: be a skeptic. “Should we not, by now, know to wait until additional, more-credible information comes our way?” he asks. “When, if ever, will we show them we're made of sterner stuff?”

In this entertaining Op-Ed, he takes on everything from trans fat to pesticides, and is sure to get people talking and, hopefully, thinking.

When Will We Tire of the Fear Mongers?

I have noticed throughout my life that there barely has been a day the news media was not trumpeting a foreboding event, an impending environmental danger, or some risky food or technological hazard clearly intended to generate fear. Some of us are old enough to remember when cranberries were driven from supermarket shelves by a phony fear campaign. More of us remember the Alar apple scare. For a while we thought twice about putting a cell phone to our ear or passing beneath a power line.

Radon gas has yet to harm anyone, yet EPA still supports scary radio ads. Asbestos coatings on the pipes in our public schools never caused lung problems among our children, but all those coatings have been removed now. Asbestos levels in the schools remain unchanged....

Freon is gone from our aerosol cans and air conditioners, but ozone levels above the polar regions thicken and thin with the seasons as always, and skin cancer rates depend, as they always have, on how far we live from the equator and our exposure to midday sun. Babies were never sickened by TRIS, the fire retardant in their jammies. DDT never caused cancer or thinned a single bird egg. It did stop malaria in its tracks and saved millions of lives, but it is not available much anymore. As a result, millions die or become sick each year....

Come to think of it, I cannot think of a single environmental or public health “crisis" that has ever proved to be true. They just fade away as time and reality wear them thin. Eventually they fall into the shadow of the next “fear du jour." ... I recognize now that we are all programmed to fear the unknown with unbridled conviction....

But now that we are grown up, shouldn't we be able to distinguish between real and unwarranted fears? Shouldn't we notice that past environmental and public health “crises” never were true, and shouldn't that realization lead us to stop overreacting each time a new doomsday scenario appears in the daily newspapers?....