Valuing One's Identity, Meeting In Heaven, Etc.

People have good reason to fret about identity theft. One wonders, though, whether the amount of such concern is inflated by a psychological factor: It would be humiliating to feel your identity isn't worth stealing. In an ABC News/Washington Post survey fielded this month, 57 percent of adults said they worry that computers and other such technologies are being used to pry into their private lives. Seventy-two percent "are concerned about the possibility their personal records could be stolen over the Internet." Earlier this year, an Ipsos-Insight survey found similar attitudes: 71 percent of adults were concerned about offline credit-card fraud; 72 percent were worried about the online variety. However, this poll found just 4 percent of respondents saying they were victims of online fraud as a result of making a purchase via the Internet; 12 percent said they'd been victimized by fraud involving a stolen credit card. Despite their fears, 60 percent of credit-card owners said the threat of identity theft has had no effect on their own online consumer behavior. Men are dogs? If only! An ad campaign aimed at promoting adoption of pets makes it clear that some women find dogs the superior beings. One ad quotes a woman who says, "Murray was short and hairy. Definitely not my type. But I gave him a chance. Thank God." Had she given a short and hairy man a similar chance, one assumes he would have botched it—as Murray the shaggy dog did not. Another ad shows a photo of an eager pooch at an animal shelter, along with this remark from a woman named Anita: "When I first met Carl, he couldn't keep his paws off me." And in the ad shown here, we meet the fellow whose "bedroom eyes" won him a place on the bed of a woman named Tina. Corn Fed Advertising of Chicago created the series for that city's Anti-Cruelty Society. What if you think there should be more sex and violence on television? Polls on the topic generally neglect to provide this option. That was the case with Time's survey this month, which gave respondents the choice of saying "yes, there's too much" or "no, there's not too much" of various bad things on the tube. Sixty-six percent said there's too much violence on broadcast TV shows, vs. 32 percent saying there's not. Fifty percent said there's too much "explicit sexual content, such as nudity," while 45 percent said there's not. One wonders how the numbers would break down if TV's current level of sex and violence were presented as a middle ground between "more, please" and "less, please." Anyhow, what's most striking in Time's poll is not the rate of disapproval but the extent to which respondents expect the government to enforce their views. There's nearly an exact match between the number of people who are "personally offended" by the amount of cursing and sexual language on TV (42 percent) and the number who want the feds to ban it (41 percent). Similarly, 32 percent are offended by drug/alcohol abuse on broadcast TV, and 33 percent want the government to ban it. People in the anti-anti-indecency camp deride this attitude as red-state prudery, but it's best seen in a larger context. Americans in general are increasingly inclined to believe the powers that be ought to protect them from being offended. One sees this in the predilection—more characteristic of campus leftists than of religious rightists—for calling on the authorities to ban speech that any favored constituency might deem "insensitive." Indeed, in this era of partisan bitterness, one thing uniting Americans across the political spectrum is the tacit belief that they have a right to go through life unoffended. Countries downwind of China might start complaining about the second-hand smoke. A Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing cites some World Health Organization data to show that one-third of the world's smokers now live in China. A Gallup poll conducted last year in that country found 26 percent of respondents saying they smoke regularly—49 percent of men, but just 3 percent of women.If only those noisy cell-phone users would confine themselves to text messaging. A study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 27 percent of the adults who own a cell phone have used it for text messaging in the past month. As you might expect, there's considerable variation among age groups (see the chart at upper right). The pattern of cell-phone ownership is considerably different, reaching its highest levels among the 28-39s (76 percent) and 40-49s (75 percent). The ownership rate is 68 percent for the 18-27s and the 50-58s.If you get to see folks again in heaven, who would you most like to encounter? That's one of the questions put to adult women in a survey conducted for Ladies' Home Journal. A plurality (31 percent) cited their mothers as top choice for such a heavenly reunion. Barely half as many (16 percent) chose their fathers. That's largely because fathers were a washout among women age 18-34 (chosen by just 6 percent of them). Among women in the 35-44 and 55-64 brackets, fathers narrowly outpointed mothers. (But keep in mind that women of this age are more likely to have a father than a mother who has already died.) A less-than-landslide 10 percent picked their spouse as the one they'd most like to meet again in heaven. Perhaps that's because many wives suspect their husbands will spend the afterlife elsewhere. Twenty-three percent of married women said they're more religiously devout than their husbands, while 1 percent said their husbands are more devout. Are Americans developing a "thicker skin" about high gas prices? An ABC News/ Washington Post poll finds 57 percent of adults saying the rise in pump prices has caused them financial hardship, including 29 percent who said it's hurt them seriously. "But that's down from 64 percent last May (37 percent seriously), when gas was 5 cents cheaper than it is now," says an ABC News analysis of the data. And the poll's measure of consumer confidence "is holding the line" amid the recent price increases. "Still, 57 percent is a substantial number to report financial hardship as a result of gas prices. It compares with an average of 47 percent in polls since 2000." And while hardship is most common among people with modest incomes, 41 percent of those with household income of $75,000-plus said they've been hurt by high gas prices. Are owners of gas-guzzling SUVs hurting the most? Alas, no. "This poll finds no difference in reported hardship as a result of gas prices between car drivers and SUV drivers," perhaps because SUV owners are clustered at the higher end of the income scale.

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Valuing One's Identity, Meeting In Heaven, Etc.

Mark Dolliver

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