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No, replies an obviously shaken customer holding out his prescription, "Valium!"

Why are the American people acting as if they need a megadose of tranquilizers?

We normally enjoy a media diet of (to use sociologist Barry Glassner's term) "hyperbolized hazards"—stories of shark attacks, amusement park accidents, and school violence, all of them engaging and all of them statistically improbable dangers.

But since September 11, the plague has come nigh our dwelling. Average Americans were killed by terrorists as they worked at their desks, waited for elevators, sipped overpriced espresso drinks, and sat on routine flights. Since then, rank-and-file postal workers have died because they handled mail for high-profile politicians and news anchors.

Yet people have overreacted to real hazards: White-powder worries have paralyzed the efforts of police and wasted the resources of fire-department hazmat units. Qantas "cordoned off" an airliner after a passenger spotted white powder—on a pastry included with his in-flight meal. Paranoid passengers drove Northwest Airlines to discontinue supplying powdered coffee creamer and sweeteners. Some Americans have hoarded Cipro, or taken the antibiotic with no reason to believe they had been exposed to anthrax.

What is the problem with worry? In addition to the waste of social resources, such overreaction is first of all an occasion for sin. There is a Screwtape moment in the comic apocalypse Good Omens, when an up-to-date tempter talks with two demons straight out of the fourteenth century. The old-fashioned demons report their day's work as planting doubt in the mind of a priest by making him look at pretty girls and corrupting a politician by making him think that a tiny bribe would not hurt. But the up-to-date demon reports that he tied up every mobile phone system in Central London for 45 minutes at lunchtime. The old-fashioned demons don't get it.

"What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? … That then they went back took it out on their secretaries … , and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which … they thought up themselves. … The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousand and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish."

Misplaced worry in response to hyperbolized hazards forces out both the everyday kindnesses that make life better and the generosity of spirit that makes it possible for us to open ourselves to new people and try new experiences. It also ruins relationships as people take out their frustrations on spouses, children, and coworkers. By protecting ourselves excessively, we diminish ourselves greatly.

Second, it draws us from spending our energies on more important things. When Proverbs 24:19 tells us not to "fret ourselves" because of evildoers, it uses a verb that means to heat oneself. The English idiom "to stew" captures this metaphor for us. When we stew, we are preoccupied with ourselves—our safety, our health, our finances, our futures. And putting ourselves in the stewpot of anxiety saps our energies that might be spent on genuine achievement, personal growth, and service.

And since most of us are not likely to be targets of the terrorists, this can be a form of egoism. When the Arizona Republic announced it would no longer accept letters to the editor through the mails, electronic newsletter entrepreneur Randy Cassingham dubbed the paper the "21st-Century Egotist." Such egotism, he said, "belongs to people who think they're important enough to be a target." What he said about the newspaper, applies to a lot of individuals.

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October (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45