Photo: Pretty Poo Eater

I'm not leaving myself out of this one.

Us Americans allow ourselves to get panicked over terrorism to the point that I'm sure there are people in other countries laughing at us. What our media and politicians define as terrorism has killed fewer Americans in the last decade than automobile crashes kill in a month in our country. You would have to include de facto terrorism like opposing gun control to get numbers anywhere near the nearly 40,000 annual auto fatalities.

Here's some information from the Centers for Disease Control on the leading causes of death in the US in 2006.

Number of deaths for leading causes of death:

* Heart disease: 631,636
* Cancer: 559,888
* Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 137,119
* Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,583
* Accidents (unintentional injuries): 121,599
* Diabetes: 72,449
* Alzheimer's disease: 72,432
* Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,326
* Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 45,344
* Septicemia: 34,234

We have allowed the politicians and the corporate media to work our country into a frenzy over something that is highly unlikely to kill us. A major cause of many of the deaths listed above is obesity, yet we aren't pushed to be in a state of constant fear of being overweight, which threatens Americans far more than Al Qaeda.

Terrorism is a significant problem, but it isn't one of our biggest ones as a country. Whenever we read, see, or hear news on terrorism, we need to take a deep breath and restore our sense of perspective.