Irrational fear of C++

I have an irrational fear of C++. More than once have I swayed away from useful libraries because all they offered was a C++ API. I have perused several books on C++, but they have done nothing but strengthened the feeling that C++ is too complex to reasonably handle. What to do?

>>16
So, when you overload operator*, what happens if you do *ptr1 * *ptr2, for example, assuming they're both scoped_ptr instances? Or *ptr * ptr, for example, even though it's probably rare that you would want to do that? How come that isn't a conflict? Would it fail as unimplemented in both cases?