Still afeared of flying

I'm continuing to dwell on this topic because I watched the Supernatural episode where Dean is afraid of flying last night. If you're not familiar with Supernatural, you should be: it's one of the best-written, most genuinely scary shows on TV.

But I digress.

The point is, in the show they mention how the Japanese have a belief that a specific demon or spirit controls every disaster, and of course, there's a demon particularly interested in plane crashes. I was watching this episode with the same friend who made me question the sanity of flight last time we took to the air, and he went on at some length about how much sense the demon-crashing airplane made to him.

He then directed me to a flight on the Discovery network where they sift through the ruins of plane crashes, personalize the victims, and air prolonged scenes of screaming passengers on a crashing plane.

To quote Bill Watterson from Calvin and Hobbes, "when you think about how well basic appliances work, it's amazing that anyone ever gets on an airplane."

But of course there's a but, because I LOVE to travel, and I have no intentions of stopping because planes occasionally crash, anymore than I plan to stop driving because hundreds of people die every year in car crashes. I think the reason we hear so much about plane crashes is because, although they're rare, they're horrible. They kill hundreds, not one or two or three. Still, when you actually sit down and look at the statistics, plane crashes are so rare that there's just no point panicking about them. Also, a significant portion of crashes are due to stupidity, not mechanical failure -- meaning you take your life in your hands every time you eat in a restaurant, too.

So keep flying, and don't worry about demons making the plane crash ;) It'll probably come right in the end.