What Me Worry?

Over the past couple of months, my family and I have been taking a Worry Class. Not that any one of us needed any help in the worry department. We each, in our own way, have mastered the art of working ourselves into a tumultuous frenzy over the smallest thing. The class has helped us start to rein in our fears and anxieties. The three of us have emerged with the same number of worries, but with new and better tools to deal with them.
One of the most important things we learned was to distinguish between three different kinds of worry: realistic, exaggerated, and imaginary. I have noticed that not everybody sees these as distinctly as you might guess. Yes, my fear of suddenly becoming very thin and sliding down a subway grating is easily filed under "imaginary," but my son will argue that his fear of lightning is a very real thing. We tried to dissuade him of this and reclassify it as "exaggerated," after all, here in coastal California, thunderstorms are a fairly rare occurrence. As we tried to convince him of this, a woman was killed by lightning outside of Los Angeles. Okay, maybe it just got a little more realistic.
Then there's the kind of fear that keeps you from doing things like sending your kid to see relatives on a plane by themselves. We have a friend who works for the airlines, and she routinely packs her kids off to this and that destination without a flinch. Then something like this happens: Continental Airlines sent a ten-year-old Massachusetts girl flying alone to New Jersey instead of Ohio. I could understand landing in Newark instead of JFK. Or maybe ending up in Oklahoma because of some mix-up with state abbreviations, but this one is wrong by about half a continent. Continental has apologized, but I'm wondering how long it will be before the girl or her parents get on board any mode of transportation without checking the destination first. Just being realistic.