Almost a year ago, I met my dear friend Karolina at the airport in Amsterdam. We had no flights booked, no backpacks packed – we just wanted to meet up again and the airport was a good meeting spot for several reasons: We both like travelling, being surrounded by travellers and both of us had to travel the same distance to get to this place. We got some food and drinks, sat down in one of the restaurants and started talking about this and that exchanged some belated birthday gifts and she surprised me with a wonderful puffin-towel. Not long into our conversation, I sensed a feeling of panic creeping over the airport and then it happened: people only a few metres away from us jumped out of their seats and started running, screaming, panicking. Karolina would not move, I got up, urged her to go with me. Her back was facing the scene so she didn’t see what I saw. Eventually, I got up and ran away. Without her.
All I heard was people screaming and running. Running away from someone, something which I knew nothing about. All I knew was that I wanted to get out of this situation as soon as possible. I ran with other people to the security-area of the gate closest and all I could hear were scraps of conversations: “Someone is shooting”, “Someone has a bomb”, “please let us in”. They would not let us in. Of course, they wouldn’t. I tried to call my boyfriend, I tried to call my sisters and my mom. No one picked up. Later, what felt like an eternity, the guards let us through to the security area and I felt a little safer. The airport was evacuated, no trains were going and no one was allowed to leave the secured areas. Then finally, my mom picked up her phone, my boyfriend picked up too and I started to feel calmer. My boyfriend told me that a man had tried to attack the police with a knife and they fired several shots at him. I tried to reach my friend, to hear if she was ok. She was. We agreed to both go home as soon as the trains were going again. The train takes roughly 40 minutes and my boyfriend picked me up at the station and as soon as we left the building I started crying. I was relieved, but scared. I honestly thought I would never see my family again when the woman next to me said that there was someone with a bomb and no one from my family picked up their phone. I spent the rest of the day at home, still shocked. My thoughts were racing: Should I go to the airport again the next day? I knew immediately that the event might leave me scarred, that it will have an impact on me and my daily life and of course I didn’t want this to happen, but deep down, I am a scared person. Not about many things, only about things I have experienced myself. The idea of getting shot or being blown up by a bomb never crossed my mind, until last year. The idea of my sister getting hurt by a Nazi never crossed my mind, until we were followed and verbally attacked and threatened in broad daylight a couple of years ago.
Since this event when I was on a train or tram, I didn’t feel comfortable. I paid and still pay too much attention to the people around me and I think about the spot that I am sitting in (not the first one when you enter the compartment, not in the middle of the train, not during rush hours). It is not the train that I don’t like, it is the feeling of “I have nowhere to go” that blocks me. I don’t want to be limited and held captive by my own mind. I don’t want to lose this part of my daily life that brought me joy – I did love travelling by train and trams, it gave me time to read. So when I came across the book Factfulness. Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling I knew I had to read it. Especially after last year. To focus on the positive, to not let one situation impact my life.
With his great sense of humour, Rosling points out that many things are getting better, not worse and that we just don’t see that. At the beginning of the book, you can test yourself and see how factful you truly are. One question (number 3 in the book) asks
“In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in poverty has…”
A: almost doubled
B: remained more or less the same
C: almost halved.
What is your guess? B? I chose B because the pictures I see in the newspapers, the commercials I see before the movie starts, suggest that nothing has changed much. This is not the case. Answer C is correct. Less and less people live in poverty and the number has halved in the last twenty years. Halved. The book is full of other examples. There is also a chapter on terrorism. And terrorism is an exception as Rosling states, because it is getting worse. Of course we are afraid of terrorism. They make it easy, they know the game of fear and they play it very well. Maybe they even invented some of the rules and the media and politics added more and joined in on this quest for attention and power. But, and this is what reading the book has helped me understand when we look purely at the numbers, it doesn’t look that scary (and I write this being fully aware that I am privileged to live in a save country). 0,05 per cent of all deaths in the year 2016 were caused by terrorism. And the number of deaths caused by terrorism in what Rosling calls Level 4 countries are decreasing. To steal one of his jokes: If you are reading this blog, you are probably living in a Level 4 country, in case you were wondering. Reading Factfulness and being made aware of how media and images are holding me captive in my own, irrational fear has helped me to get back on the right path. When I am now in the train and my thoughts are wandering, I remind myself to be factful, and that means to only “carry opinions for which you have strong supporting facts”. Since I don’t have them, I am getting better at letting go of my fear and enjoying the ride, one book at a time.
