Commandment 2Turn off the News Go Easy On The Law and Order, Too

      Is there one single reason we are so much more scared than our parents? One person, place, or thing that left us so shaken that we spend literally four times as much time supervising our kids than our own moms and dads did in 1975? Yes, and I'll give you a hint:

      It has white hair, seems to be on CNN about twenty-six hours a day, and has piercing blue eyes so brimming with empathy that you want to hold him tight and co-parent that baby of his.

      Of course, it's not just Anderson Cooper that's driving us crazy with fear about crime. But he's part of the problem, just like cable news is, and local news is, and whatever we call the “news” that clickbait leads us to is. And also Law and Order, and Law and Order, and Law and Order, and the other Law and Order. The one with the special victims. Or, as TV historian Robert Thompson says, “The Law and Order for people who like to see crimes that are grossly sexually fetishized and practiced on children or vulnerable adults.”

      What's not to like?

The problem with all these shows, from the news to the dramas ripped from the news, is that they present us with a world so focused on the least common, most horrific crimes that we get a totally skewed picture of what it's like out there. How skewed? Let's take a look at one week's TV offerings. Not whatever's on YouTube's Beheading Channel. (There must be one, right?) Just plain-old TV.

      Well, hmm. During the particular week I looked at, you could watch a double murder on The Mentalist. That's nice. Then it says there's a “dismembered, headless body” discovered on Bones. I guess Bones did some test marketing and realized that a merely dismembered body might lose some viewers. (“Forget it! If the head's still attached, I'm not watching.”) Then there was CSI: NY. The episode I watched showed, oh, a guy's stomach sliced open because he swallowed a key. And a body dredged up from a swamp. Then there was a woman almost drowned by a madman in a bathtub, but she survived—only to stumble around and accidentally impale her breast on a towel hook. (I hate it when that happens.) On the local news right after that, there was a guy on fire, and a guy who plunged to death, naked. And that night's Law and Order re-run featured a fourteen-year-old girl raped by a Serbian war criminal. Well, we didn't see the actual rape. But we saw her going, “Mph! Mphmmph!” through the duct tape over her mouth as the leering guy reached for her thigh. (She was, of course, bound with a phone cord—like anyone still has a cord phone—and blindfolded.)

      I'll get to real news shows in a minute, because we all know how they can make you feel totally depressed about the world. But less attention has been paid to the fact that even these so-called entertainment shows (Rape! Bondage! Towel-hook impaling! That's entertainment!) end up changing our whole outlook.

The problem is that once we see horrific images, only half of our brain takes the time to say, “Wow. That makeup person did an incredible job with those puncture wounds. And hats off to the wonderful writing staff!” (If, indeed, any part of the brain ever thanks writers.) The other half of our brain just takes in those gruesome images wholesale and files them under “Sick World, comma, What we live in.”

      In his book The Science of Fear, Daniel Gardner explains that once an image gets into that “reptilian” part of the brain, not only can you not shake it, you also can't extricate it from all the other images and feelings jostling around in there, either. After all, it's only been the last hundred years or so that the brain has started seeing realistic-looking images (TV, movies) that weren't directly applicable to its fate (lions, spears). So it hasn't figured out yet how to separate the real from the manufactured. Especially whatever's manufactured for Liam Neeson.

      Thus, the fight-or-flight, feel-it-in-your-guts reptilian brain treats a Joker trailer and the nightly news as one and the same. So when we are faced with a situation we think might be risky and we are trying to figure out what to do, it starts rummaging through all the horrible stuff it has seen and comes to the conclusion, “Jeez Louise! Look what can happen! Run for your life!”

      Now, if you're wondering why our reptilian brains would be making us more scared today than our parents’ reptilian brains made them just a generation ago, one reason is that when your parents were growing up, they weren't awash in quite this level of gore. They weren't seeing dead bodies with realistic towel-hook holes in them. They weren't seeing all those autopsies CSI popularized—if that's the word—or horrific dismemberments or decaying bodies dredged from the river. In fact, says TV historian Thompson, “I don't think there's a single episode of Law and Order that could have even been shown before 1981.” That's because, until then, graphic images like the girl with the duct tape, rapist, and phone cord were taboo. In fact, they were the stuff of porn.

      What happened?

In 1971, the rules changed. From 1929 up to that point, says Thompson, broadcasters held themselves to a code of conduct so strict that they couldn't even use the word “pregnant.” They couldn't use bad language. They couldn't show a toilet bowl on TV. (That's why the Ty-D-Bol man was always, confusingly, in the tank.) Through the Great Depression, a world war, two nuclear bombs, and the civil rights movement, the material you could hear on the radio and see on TV stayed pretty much the same. Tame. Then, in 1971, along came All in the Family.

      That