Lock your doors, close your windows! Watch out! Duck and cover! ISIS is coming! They'll creep and crawl out of their hypothetical no-go zones, or maybe from under your bed and inside your closet, they'll steal quietly into your home, into your very room. Succubi incarnate they are, licking their wicked yellow teeth, brandishing gleaming surgical knives ferociously, to harvest your juicy organs and feast, rat-like on your tender, unguarded soul. Only Rick Perry the Selfless, or possibly Scott Walker the Brave—or maybe Donald Trump if he's had his morning make-up session—stands between you and the greatest evil since Siberian MIRVs hidden deep in icy, earthen cylinders pointed the way to the nation's homeland.
American voters support 62 - 30 percent sending U.S. ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, with strong support across all party, gender and age groups, according to a Quinnipiac University National poll released today. Men back U.S. troop deployment 68 - 28 percent, while women support it 57 - 33 percent, the independent Quinnipiac University Poll finds.
Yeah, we've given into hysteria not seen since aluminum tubes for artillery rockets morphed into whirling centrifuges distilling weapons-grade fissile material for Al Qaeda. And it didn't take high-tech nukes or toppling the World Trade Center. All it took was a few chilling YouTube videos with some clowns wearing all black and waving swords.
To see what should really be of mortal concern, head below, and prepare to be not very afraid of terrorism.
Image courtesy of DemFromCT and CDC. Click for more info
Cephalopods have three hearts, but we unlucky mammals have just the one. A particularly tragic example of unintelligent design, where something as mundane as a mechanical clog in a single vessel might as well be the greatest serial killer of humans on Earth (611,105 deaths in 2013). Right on its heels is cancer racking up 584,881 kills: where one stray cosmic ray, a single marauding virus, or one teeny-tiny replication error in one genome can set a cell on a malignant collision course with mortality. Heart disease and cancer alone are responsible for almost two-thirds of deaths in the U.S.
Next up is a smorgasbord of pulmonary disease (149,205), stroke (128,978), Alzheimer's (84,767), complications from diabetes (75,578), flu (56,979), suicide (41,149) and motor vehicle accidents (~35,000) just to name an infamous few. If that's not enough to be terrified of, let's add in more exotic causes of death—antibiotic-resistant staph and flesh-eating strep, ALS and MS, hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes, all the way down to really rare and horrible things like fatal familiar insomnia and rabies. And that's just recently, in the modern era. In centuries past, tuberculosis alone knocked off as many as one in every five people via contagious death by bloody asphyxiation. If you were lucky, it only turned you into a 70-pound scarecrow over long, painful years before suffocation or opportunistic infection finally prevailed.
Note what's not mentioned so far: Terrorism. Whether by ISIS, Al Qaeda, or the more homegrown domestic variety. Even averaging in the nearly 3,000 people killed on 9/11 to long-term mortality tables, the deaths of Americans while in the U.S. from terrorism are so low they would be barely visible in a color-coded image if displayed to scale. Our fear of ISIS is completely out of whack to the actual threat they present to date.
A few days ago we were warned ISIS was going to get us while shopping. No doubt a round caught mid-chest in the parking lot of a mall is as deadly as a grapefruit-sized tumor in the brain. But we have mass shootings all the time in the U.S., and seeing as how, so far, ISIS hasn't been able to rustle up even one lone, disgruntled gunman perched above the escalator between Footlocker and the sun-glass kiosk, we are each in way more danger from weather or choking to death while driving to the mall than we are from a terrorist bullet while loitering at the indoor fountain.
ISIS isn't so much a real threat as a ghost story told from sleeping bags under the twinkling stars, with the flat-screen TV tuned to cable news standing in for the iconic campfire. The danger is so remote its almost a luxury, we can flip to the panic channel and dip our feral hind-brains in it like a toe in a hot bath, sampling the sensation of terror for pure entertainment value. News media has known this for a long time: if it bleeds it leads, because ratings. And that's exactly the sweet spot ISIS has dialed in. A sort of unintentional symbiosis has sprung up between head-chopping savages, fear-mongering politicians, and news programs.
Right now we have more to fear from the last two than the former. Sadly, seeing is believing, and both evolution and culture have wired us to be especially afraid of anything with a face, with people at the top of the list. But in terms of actual data, the Grim Reaper most likely stalking you this very moment isn't wearing an ISIS slogan on its robe; it's way, way more likely to come in the guise of fried cheese and chocolate milkshakes.
Actually, that's not entirely true. There is one category of westerners who are at grave risk from ISIS: the idealistic young people who travel from Europe and elsewhere to join them.