Fear Factory

Washington has the same challenge our brains do -- separating real threats from perceived threats. The triage, Siegel says, is not going so well. "If you are constantly putting the worst-case scenario out there," Siegel says, "you are communicating to people that that's the most likely thing to happen."

That, he says, "is the reason you have a scared nation. Everybody believes that the worst thing is going to happen tomorrow. That's not true."

We should prepare for all scenarios -- the worst and the best -- he says. Instead "we are constantly personalizing risk in ways that are not realistic."

Tom Finnigan of Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), puts it this way: "Humans have a tendency to overestimate small risks while underestimating big risks, and politicians and special interests are very good at taking advantage of it."

The world is a dangerous place -- and it became even more so in the wake of 9/11 -- but it couldn't possibly be as treacherous, as dastardly, as booby-trapped as the government and the corporations and the media would have us believe.

And if the fear has flowed into the corners of Ridgely, it is doubtless in every corner of our country. Consider these events, as documented by CAGW and other groups:

Concerned that terrorists might infiltrate the state's bingo parlors, Kentucky received a $36,300 Homeland Security grant in October to thwart such a possibility.

Fearful of explosives, Grand Forks, N.D., this year used $145,000 from Homeland Security to buy a bomb-dismantling robot. In September, the Grand Forks Herald reported that the robot, five police officers, a sheriff's deputy and an X-ray machine were deployed to check out a suspicious nylon backpack left by vagrants under a pine tree. It contained bricks.

Skittish Boston Harbor officials have a dinner cruise yacht doing double duty as an anti-terrorist vessel.