I am generally a fearful person. I was freaked out by airplanes long before 9/11. Hell, I think roaches are out to get me. But I'm getting really sick of being told to be intermittently terribly afraid of shoe bombs and liquid bombs and mysterious plagues when there are much more likely dangers that we face in this country, every day, with minimal hysteria.

Yesterday, Atrios and Chris talked about traffic accidents. Holy shit, a lot of people [some 40,000 per year] die in car crashes. And yet, most of us still drive without panicking every time we start an ignition. I am primarily a pedestrian, and I almost got ran over by a stupid SEPTA bus that was blowing through a red light yesterday, but I still walked the exact same route today. My point? I think it's time to declare a war on traffic accidents.

If we do need to be hysterical about things that might kill us, let's direct our mania at the most likely targets. People should not be allowed to drive like drunken lunatics and kill innocent people — a war on them! And let's have a war on cancer, which killed two innocent members of my family in the past several years. A war on heart disease! A war on poverty! A war on AIDS! A war on crime — If Middle Eastern terrorists came to Philly and killed a couple hundred people this year, everyone would be up in arms. When our own thugs do it, for a lot of people, it's shrug central.

I'm certainly not in the position to tell anyone else to stop being afraid, but geez. Let's try to keep things in perspective.