By God, there may be hope for you, yet!

Actually looking beneath the haze of crap spewed forth in the main-stream media in order to find the truth, is commendable.

Regardless of anyone’s current political tilt, I highly encourage all readers to question statistics being tossed their way in the media and especially question the sampling method used, structure of the question, the size and randomness of the sample.

Some years ago, I was leading a search team for a missing child in Jacksonville, Florida. The missing girl, Maddie, reminded me of my oldest daughter when she was nine years old. While getting organized one morning, I met an executive from the Center for Missing Children, the non-profit that puts all of those pictures of kids on milk cartons. I asked about how many of those kids were still missing and this fellow told me that 87% of the kids on those cartons are just custody battles; the kid is just with the non-custodial parent. Of the remaining 13%, 10% are run-aways; kids who intentionally left what they saw as a bad home. The remaining 3% were actually abducted, but almost always, they are abducted by someone KNOWN TO THE FAMILY. I have no way of knowing if his statistics were contrived, but he quoted those numbers with such authority, his message sounded valid. If his numbers were true, the fear level should go way down with regard to abductions, but it hasn’t.

This information is suppressed because the Center for Missing Children raises a ton of money by scaring the crap out of Sally Soccermom. Why the media has not made this truth known to the public may be because that the occasional sensational story about abductions sells ad space, while sterile analysis of statistics does not. The bottom line is that millions of moms and dads are needlessly afraid of people who they meet every day and they are raising a generation of paranoid Americans. For a nation whose life blood is trade, one wonders how we will survive in a society where nobody trusts each other.

Oh, by the way, we found Maddie after about a week. She had been murdered by the thirteen year-old boy across the street, who her parents regularly allowed her to play with. The thirteen year-old boy killed Maddie and hid her little body under his water bed. When the boy’s parents were asked why they had not searched the boy’s room earlier, they said that the boy had erected a, “Parents keep-out” sign on his door.

These mindless acts of violence and murder surely make us wary of the world, but we must not fall into the logical fallacy of arguing from the specific to the general. Bad things happen and will happen, but we needn’t live our lives being afraid of everyone, especially basing fears on the incorrect use of inference.

We have been fed a growing deluge of fear mongering propaganda since the 9-11 murders. Our citizens have become afraid of one another and we have, with some few noteworthy exceptions, become a society that is less kind and considerate to one another; who are more likely to ostracize a stranger than to help him.

We as Americans must turn this trend around. We must learn to look past the propaganda, the phony stats and those who pit one race or class against another, and build a society based on that which is good in man. The goodness is still in us, it has just been temporarily conditioned out of our outward demeanor by the incessant fear spread in our People by the Media and our multinational corporation controlled, government.

Posted by J. Tyler Ballance on 27 February 2008 @ 8am

Agreed, this can also be applied to the drug court. They just make up numbers to sell themselves

Posted by Kathy on 27 February 2008 @ 5pm