Feeling like Schopenhauer

In Switzerland, nuclear bomb shelters have been prepared in every hamlet and city, with enough supplies for months of underground living. The assessment of risk is a high art in Swiss life, and they have correctly recognized that no cost is too high against the threat of complete obliteration. Granting our American society an equal measure of reason, why is there no will to prepare against such disasters as New Orleans? The danger of hurricanes in the Caribbean has been meticulously documented, and it is widely known that major storms strike with regular frequency upon that coastline. Preparing against such known environmental dangers should take precedence over such a vague and ill-defined threat as a missile attack over the poles, yet our collective spending does not reflect this. I think it must be true, as James Walsh writes, that "we respond to risks based upon dramatic evidence, not objective evidence." This principle governs a great deal of American social policy, and yet I know of no specific origin for this state of affairs. As the most media, story-telling, fiction-based culture on Terra, perhaps we are most ready to think of our political issues in terms of narrative. Thus those issues which inspire the greatest amount of polarizing debate and emotional content, are inevitably discussed in the terms of fictional excess. Words like "disaster, meltdown, doom, fateful, holocaust" fill the airwaves, in an effort to connect the eternally fluid patterns of social life to the more easily recognized forms of story. Could fiction be hurting us, damaging our powers of recognition? What can be done? Please, any thoughts?