[hinkley]

Americans have a real problem with proportions.

If you put a million people in a city and 100 of them die of a flu, everyone screams epidemic. You spread those same people out over all the small towns in a state, and 200 of them die, it's just fine.

Because, I suspect, we often associate statistics with a location rather than a cross section of society. We think "someone in my town was murdered", not "the murder rate is 1/250,000".

[fastball]

I think this is a problem of humanity, not a problem of Americans.