Asteroids, Sharks and Heralds of War

A couple of years ago, a big-budget Hollywood movie featured a large, rocky object headed for our planet. I never saw the film, but the trailer was sensational. Large, rocky object hurtling through space. Scared people on Earth. Brave astronauts determined to blow the large, rocky object to smithereens and save the world. High drama.

Fortunately for the filmmakers, the effort to blow the large, rocky object to smithereens was less than totally successful, leaving smaller rocky chunks to cause massive damage, luridly depicted in living color. Nothing like a good scare to keep theater seats full.

One spinoff from that film was a widespread sense of concern for our planet. What if such a threat really materialized? Could we do anything to save our butts? After all, a similar event seems to have delivered the coup de grace to the dinosaurs. The Earth is ubiquitously pocked where other objects have socked it. This is not fantasy: The threat is real. We must live in fear!

Gradually the ruckus subsided. Astronomers pointed out that such events are really quite rare in the vastness of space and the capaciousness of geologic time. NASA intoned that interception and destruction of an object was at least theoretically possible. Nuclear physicists assured us that they could build a bomb big enough to destroy almost anything. We heaved a collective sigh of relief and quickly forgot about the putative threat. Whew! That was close!

A similar mass frenzy erupted just this year in reaction to a spate of shark attacks along the East Coast. A few dozen incidents in Florida followed by a deadly episode in North Carolina landed sharks on the front page and on top of the evening news. What to do? The lions and tigers and bears of the sea are out to eat us all! Soon we were assaulted by scare stories, expert opinion and daily reportage from aerial observers who busied themselves counting sharks along the coast. Fear! Fear! The sharks are coming!

Truth be told, if truth has any bearing here, sharks have been there right along, by the millions, and if there is any urgent tale to be told concerning their number it is that their number is dwindling. Most critically, we have replaced sharks as the ocean's top prey species. We eat what they used to eat; animals without a food source tend to die off. Of course, we eat sharks as well, further depressing their numbers.

The person most responsible for modern-day shark fear, Peter Benchley, has recanted. Now a devoted friend of sharks, Benchley has publicly disavowed the bad rap he created in Jaws and contributes considerable time and money to preservation efforts. A cynic might point out that the author has all that time and money available precisely because of that book and the subsequent film, but cynicism aside, sharks need all the friends they can get.

Sadly, the media mania surrounding this year's double handful of attacks on humans is likely to increase shark death. Fishermen will be more likely to kill unintentionally hooked sharks instead of releasing them, and others will purposefully seek and destroy the big fish. Protective legislation will face higher hurdles, and fear will tend to crowd out reasoned consideration of ocean ecology.

At the risk of appearing insensitive, I would observe that we can draw a lesson from the asteroids and sharks that applies to the current tempest in Washington. (If you are fully caught up in the quest for infinite justice and vengeance and self-righteousness and hate that so pervade the media just now, you will need to take a deep breath and relax before you read further. Or, perhaps, just stop now, turn the page, and move on to less fractious fare.)

Like asteroids and sharks, terrorists are not new. Nor are terrorist acts against Americans. And despite our horror at the recent killing of more than 6,000 mostly nonmilitary citizens by a group of mostly unknown zealots, that number doesn't constitute a staggering death toll at this moment in history. The overblown institutional response to the tragedy -- pumped up by