'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

WASHINGTONIANS REALLY ARE DIFFERENT: It's

WASHINGTONIANS REALLY ARE DIFFERENT: It's been my surmise for some time now that people who live inside Washington's infamous Beltway really are a different breed from the rest of us. This insight came to me roughly three minutes after our family moved here to Central Virginia-- from Washington DC-- in 1997.

Okay, maybe it took more than three minutes. But the point is, the two-and-a-half hour drive from DC to our city (Charlottesville) really does convey a person to a different kind of a place. In one of my Feb. 24 posts on JWN, I reflected a little on how traumatized many DC residents might well be at this point, what with not only 9/11 at the Pentagon, but also after that the anthrax scare, then the terrifying sniper scare... and on how maybe many of them, including the figure I (possibly inappropriately) deride as Bombs-away Don, are maybe acting more out of a sense of fear than one of possibility and hope...

And now, here come Richard Morin's "Unconventional Wisdom" column in The Washington Post to prove my point. Washingtonians really are different from all the people I know who live elsewhere in this great republic... Different, too, I would venture to add, from all other peoples everywhere else throughout the world, with the possible exception of the Israelis.

In today's column, Morin cites a WP survey of 600 randomly selected local residents, conducted "earlier this month"-- meaning, presumably, February-- as having found that, "about two in three were stockpiling water, food and batteries or taking other precautions such as designating a safe room in their homes, just as the government said we should."

Two in three? That is truly staggering. I don't know if anyone has any hard data from other cities. But I am pretty darn certain you wouldn't find a figure anything like that high anyplace else in the country. Not even in New York.

(Morin's piece also cited some of the survey's findings re Washingtonians who had strengthened their arsenals as one of their responses to the heightened level of threat. "I got extra firearms and they are always loaded," one 22-year-old Virginia woman told the survey-takers.)

So yes, those folks really do seem to need TLC more than anything else. I'm going up to DC next week, to take part in the International Women's Day events for peace. Maybe we could take a bunch of teddy-bears to hand out to the beleaguered locals. Would that help them assuage their heightened fearfulness?

Any other ideas?