Killer Peas by Rev. Thomas Schade

In my sermon on Sunday, January 3rd, I quoted Rabbi Edwin H. Friedman to the effect that the culture we live in has become chronically nervous and anxious, and so is regressing, like a small child who returns to bed-wetting after a big change in the life of the family. A nervous society exaggerates the dangers it faces and seeks safety and security more than anything else.

Of course, just because you are nervous doesn’t mean that there aren’t real reasons to be concerned. And for many, the general state of the economy is plenty worrisome.

If you are younger, the job market stinks.

If you are middle-aged, the real estate market stinks.

And if you are older, the state of your investments stinks.

And then, there is terrorism. For years, it had faded from our immediate consciousness as we adapted to the strange new protocols of flying. And now, there was this incident in which a Nigerian man tried to blow up a plane descending into Detroit, with explosives packed into his underwear, on Christmas Day. You may have seen something about it; it’s been mentioned a few times on the news. Anxiety about terrorism is being wound up like a big spring.

We will be able to gauge the level of anxiety about terrorism by the nickname the attacker gets. If he is called “The Christmas Bomber”, it means the tension level is high, what with Christmas being the most sacred day of the year. If, on the other hand, he becomes known as ‘the Underwear Bomber’, it means that calm is prevailing. Imagining your enemies in their underwear is a well-established technique for overcoming your fear.

Micheal O’Hare is a professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He writes on the blog “Reality Based Community”:

In 2008, there were about 800 million commercial (scheduled carrier) airplane trips from, in, and to the US, on about 11 million flights. In the decade since 2000 (traffic has been up and down, of course), let’s say 100 million flights. Of these, three were successfully used as terror weapons against non-passengers, a fourth was crashed, and six crashed in accidents with no or few survivors. If we just use the crude averages as a guide to probability, when you get on a plane, you are drawing one pea from a bucket of peas that contains four black ones (you die from terrorism) and six red ones (you die from something the Transportation Security Administration has nothing to do with).

How big is this bucket? I did a little experimental research with the extra black-eyed peas I didn’t cook up for New Years: it’s 6400 gallons, which is about six feet across and four feet tall. Full of peas, with ten killers among them, four terrorist. Is there anything that could make it worth diving into this bucket, groping around, and picking one pea? Attitudes to risk vary, but I don’t consider myself especially courageous and I would do it for almost anything nice. I would do it for twenty bucks. I certainly did it repeatedly in order to get from A to B when there were only the six accident peas, without even thinking about it.

Of course, none of this means that we ought not to take all reasonable and prudent steps possible to keep the number of killer peas at a minimum.

One of the messages that institutions of Liberal Religion offers to the wider community is that while our feelings of fear and anxiety and helplessness may be authentic and real to us, they do not necessarily define reality. Remember there is also the human potential for careful and creative thought, cooperative effort, and courage, and we are confident that those qualities will prevail.