Don Donovan: The comfort of doom denial

I am getting pretty tired of people trying to scare me to death. It seems TV, radio, newspapers, domestic media and world media are intent on telling me, almost daily, that I am doomed.

It's a parade of predictions, some of which might happen tomorrow, some in the next 10 years and some never - statistical probabilities which are so ridiculous that you'd have to be cretinously credulous to believe them.

A TV report, fleshed out with lurid America's Cup-type graphics, predicts that we have a 10 per cent chance of a tsunami hitting New Zealand in the next 50 years. Does that mean a 100 per cent chance in 500 years? Or 1 per cent in 5 years?

And when it hits, having groped its sneaky way across the Pacific Ocean like a terrorist insurgent from Chile, it's likely to kill 10,000. A nice, round figure, that.

But it goes on to say that when the wave hits Gisborne it'll likely be 8.1m high, Wellington 4.9m and Auckland 3.5m - figures almost as precise as my bank balance.

Then, we're told that 2100 people will die in Gisborne and 1500 in Christchurch; but when it gets to Wellington the estimated loss of innocent souls is 1678. Not 1677 or 1679 but 1678. Who makes these calculations?

With all these terrifying statistics clattering around my ears like numeric soup I know there's nothing I can do about doom apart from what I've done quite by chance; like living on top of a hill and owning neither a boat nor a beach house.

Mind you, being on a hill isn't going to stop me getting avian flu. I mean, some bloody chickens can sort of fly (especially if you drive too fast through the farmyard) and in any case it'll probably be picked up by sparrows and pukekos with loose morals.

Doom is almost inescapable. They say it's not a question of if but when. So I see shadows of The Grim Reaper in every cobwebby corner until I read some more statistics: in among all the world misery that's likely to pack the churches once the H5N1 anti-virus medications have been used up by Cabinet ministers, I find that in the past three years only 138 cases of H5N1 (caught from chickens, not humans) have been reported to the World Health Organisation and 71 people have died, all in south-east Asia.

Yet we're scared out of our wits by something that pales into insignificance compared to our road death figures. So what do we do? Get under our beds in the foetal position cuddling our teddy bears and sucking Tamiflu like lollies?

But never mind the tsunami or the flu. There's always the inevitable devastating volcano appearing out of the Waitemata Harbour, an earthquake along the Hutt Rd, Crater Lake doing another Tangiwai, or another bash of Sars. Or maybe we'll be told that we really can get Aids off lavatory seats - a breaking-news-scandal-fact that the medical profession has been concealing for years.

Frankly, doom warning is as much subject to overload as your eternal charitable appeal - in the end you don't want to hear any more. You just switch off and go into denial. That's where I'll be most comfortable.

* Don Donovan is an Albany writer and illustrator.