Doug McIntyre: Pass the Tums, he's drowning in tsunamis of fearsome factoids

Don't panic. The experts have everything under control.

We're told a giant plume of radioactive gas is heading toward Los Angeles from the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in Japan, but it's nothing to worry about.

We have everything to worry about.

Doug McIntyre's column appears in the Los Angeles Daily News on Wednesdays and Sundays. You can reach him at dncolumnist@dailynews.com.

In our media saturated world we're fed a continuous diet of catastrophe. We ricochet from crisis to crisis, disaster to disaster - September 11th, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Israeli/Palestinian mess, revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, $100-a-barrel oil, $4-a-gallon gas, double-digit unemployment, skyrocketing food prices, giant deficits, higher taxes, slashed services, the Gulf oil spill, blizzards! Floods! Global warming! AIDS! Teen pregnancy and illegal aliens! Muslims! Obama! Republicans! Greedy unions and evil millionaires!

Kobe's sore ankle and the McCourts' divorce rattle around in our brains along with no-fly zones and a million dead sardines in Redondo Beach.

Now we're told plutonium is heading for the Sepulveda Pass, but that's nothing to worry about?

Please! Tums and anti-depressants are my two favorite food groups.

We're marinated in an endless parade of grief and outrage. Like glowing isotopes; it's in the air we breathe.

But ignorance isn't bliss - it's ignorance.

To remain a self-governing

people we require an informed electorate. But we're bombarded by so much misinformation - with factoids, spin, demagoguery and even outright lunacy regularly tumbling out of our televisions, radios, websites, blogs and iPhones - the truth has become a jump ball. Pseudo-science competes with actual scholarship and scholarship is often dismissed as bubble-headed ivy tower dreaming. Everyone's an expert so nobody's an expert.

We're suffering from a deficit of trust.

We just don't trust "official" anything. Governments regularly lie or blunder, while corporations only seem interested in reducing liability and preserving the brand. From religious institutions to your favorite sports team, it's nearly impossible to get a straight story.

Highly credentialed nuclear scientists assure us we have nothing to fear from the terrible disaster in Japan. Then again, highly credentialed nuclear scientists OK'd the design and placement of an atomic power plant on a subduction zone known to produce giant earthquakes and tsunamis, so why should we trust them?

Trust has to be earned and so many in positions of responsibility have punted away credibility, they've produced a toxic cloud of cynicism in their wake. We need to hold our leaders to the highest standard, a dishonest cop or a weasel city councilman all contribute to the culture of distrust. Honesty starts with us.

In the meantime, I'm pretty sure L.A. has nothing to fear from Japan, but just in case, does Coppertone make SPF 1400?

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