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.

FYI: If you're feeling depressed, one of the worst things you could possibly do is tool around MySpace looking at people you used to know. I really should know better.

Sometimes I just want to make the world stop spinning and the planes land and buses and trains and cars stop and just get all the people I love in one place. I mean, I am glad I live in a time where people are able to travel all over the world — but, on the other hand, I kind of hate the expectation that one must move far away from one's family and everyone must be in constant motion, always going somewhere or coming back from somewhere. Once, I told my dad that I wished my sister didn't live 3,000 miles away and wouldn't things just be more simple if we all lived under one hut like ancient people? And my dad rolled his eyes and said, "Oh please, I can just hear you now: 'That's my leaf!' 'No, that's my leaf!'" which was funny but kind of unfair. Anyway, I don't really want to live in a hut, but I wish I lived in a close drive to my family and closest friends. Unfortunately, none of them live anywhere I want to be right now. Part of me just wants everything simple and everything close by because that seems very Zen and natural. But part of me wants everything simple and close by because I have severe anxiety and eliminating the endless choices seems like a way to eliminate the anxiety. Of course, this wouldn't really work because eliminating my own choices won't stop me from being jealous of people who are able to travel freely.

Traveling to visit people is especially stressful for me because I am absolutely petrified of air travel and not especially comfortable on other transportation options, either. These fears really mess up my thinking, because whenever I hear of people taking cool trips I get jealous in a weird way: I'm not jealous that they went on a trip exactly; I'm jealous that they went and didn't have to stay up all night for a week before hand agonizing over plane crashes and that they didn't have to take Valium to get themselves on the plane and once they got to their destination they didn't spend half the time worrying if they would ever make it back safely. It is actually pretty amazing how much I have managed to travel considering how severe my anxiety can be.

I don't know how much I would want to stop the world if I didn't have anxiety. But I do think there's something to be said for having a strong community of family (bio or chosen) and friends in one general location. I wish I had that.