Boy, are we gullible. Americans are willing to believe just about anything.

That’s important to know, seeing as the caucuses are just around the corner.

Your vote in election ’08 may differ depending on whether you will believe anything or use a bit of skepticism. For instance, when a candidate tells you they’re going to solve all the problems of the nation and the world, you may want to save some room for doubt.

Remember West Nile?

In 2001, the virus broke out of New York City and moved down the eastern side of the country. Panic had been rising when the virus had been contained in New York, and now it spread across the nation.

It can cause death, we heard over and over again.

West Nile caused about

1,050 deaths between 1999 and 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Something we should have known about? Yes. Cause for panic and extensive news coverage? Maybe not so much.

There was also Y2K.

We were told all kinds of chaos would ensue when the year on the computers flipped to ’00. The computers wouldn’t know what to do, thinking it was 1900 instead of 2000.

People withdrew enough money to get them through the impending crisis. Some fled to grocery stores to stock up on canned goods.

Maybe we were right to be so worried, maybe not. But we still all latched onto the idea without really questioning it.

Then, a few years later, we were told Iraq possessed WMDs. It was enough of a concern to the American people that now the acronym is instantly understood in almost every household, like scuba or NASA.

Our government and the American people justified going to war over these weapons. When we got over to Iraq, we found no WMDs. Some would say that we were foolish to believe they were ever there.

Even more recently has been the avian influenza scare.

Not a single case of avian flu has been reported in North America, according to the McKinley Health Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the World Health Organization. Not only that, it’s very hard to contract the avian flu at all, according to the McKinley Health Center.

So why are we so scared?

Did you know in 1975, Newsweek printed a story about the impending global cooling? It was a serious concern.

“[Scientists] are almost unanimous in the view that the trend [toward global cooling] will reduce agricultural productivity . If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic,” said the story by Peter Gwynne.

He looks foolish now. And so might we to future generations in our panic over global warming.

All of these issues were right to be taken into account, to have been discussed and researched. But it’s up for debate whether any of them should have caused the level of alarm and worry that they did.

There seems to be a fine line between reasonable concern and panic. Americans err to the side of panic, and usually end up looking foolish.

Edgar Allen Poe once said, “Believe only half of what you see, and nothing you hear.” Well, maybe we should also use some skepticism when listening to him, but he makes a point.

We should decide carefully not only what to panic over, but what to believe in general.

Don’t believe something just because Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani said it. Take everything the candidates say with a grain of doubt and research.

That applies for every major thing you will ever hear or read. Choose what you believe wisely, or you could end up feeling like a complete fool.

– Bailey Lewis is a sophomore

in English from Indianola.