The world can be a scary place. You don’t have to go looking very far in the newspaper to find out about the latest toxin, plague, or general crisis that’s going to keep you up with night terrors for a few days. (Worse still is if you hear about it on TV — c’mon, how many times have you heard the anchor intone “Is there a poison in your home that could be killing you RIGHT NOW? Check out our report at 11!” And you just want to yell, “11? I might be DEAD by then! Feed me information!”) And if you work IN the media business, you hear about it pretty much nonstop. Mold in the basement. Lead in toys or your home’s paint. Horrible side effects from children’s cold medicine.
And of course, this all multiplies exponentially if you’re a parent. (Not many new college freshmen were terribly concerned when it turned out Sarge from “Cars” might be poisonous if you chewed him, but parents of toddlers were frantically picking through their little ones’ car collections trying to find the offending Jeep.)
But the point to all this — the point of media in general covering this sort of thing, and certainly the point of Angie’s List making such an emphasis on it — is not to be AFRAID, but to be INFORMED. Knowledge is power, so they say, and the more you know about what you’re getting into, the better chance you and your loved ones have of making it through intact. Because most of these things are controllable. You can be the parent of a toddler living in a 1955-built home loaded with lead paint and still sleep peacefully at night if you’re aware of the danger and take the appropriate steps to contain it. It might not be easy, but it can be done. Admittedly, some things are easier to contain than others, but in all cases it’s still better than blissful ignorance.
So, yes, the world’s scary and sometimes it might even be as dangerous as you hear. But helping deal with that is what we’re doing here at Angie’s List, every day, pulling together as much information as we can to give the best guidance and give you a fighting chance to make it through the next crisis, whether it’s scrambling to get that alternator replaced or finding someone to repair that basement leak RIGHT NOW.
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