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Fear and Fear Mongering

© Katherine E. Rabenau

The old FDR quote "we have nothing to fear but fear itself," is certainly a truism for agoraphobics, but it is also true for society at large. I was originally going to write about Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome this week, but as I listen to the news and hear stories from friends, it seems to me that it's more important to talk about our penchant - in American where I live, but I suspect it is not unique to us - for feeding the dragon of fear with rumors, half truths, and outright lies.

Fear mongering in modern society is practically an industry. Maybe it IS an industry. I think the media thrives on it. Terrorists use it and thrive on it. But governments also use it to justify actions which are often ethically unjustifiable. All around the world, we use fear on a grand scale as an excuse for hate and hateful actions. And in the microcosm of daily life, we feed the rampant human fears about living and dying as though they were our salvation instead of a disease in our psyche.

In America, as we began to recognize sexual abuse, instead of dealing with it, we have raised a society of children and adults who are afraid to touch one another. Rather than teaching our children to trust their instincts and to discriminate between truth and lies, we have taught them to start from the premise that everyone is to be feared, that everything is a lie until proven otherwise. How sad. And how foolish. Take it from one who knows: fear does not protect us. It only cripples us. It only causes us pain.

Another big fear that runs rampant in America - where we have a lot of time on our hands to terrify ourselves over our luxuries - is the fear of almost everything we eat and drink - except of course those items like cigarettes, sodas, and alcohol which actually ARE the most dangerous. Those we studiously ignore, while obsessing over the carcinogenic nature of everything from soup to nuts. I'm not saying that there aren't things to consider as we plan our daily diets, but I had a friend who at one time seemed literally terrified of everything she ate. She made herself sick worrying about whether she was eating healthily. She did at least as much harm to herself with her fear than any of the additives and other things she was concerned about could have done to her. In a world where many people starve, some of us are afraid of the cornucopia of sustenance that surrounds us. Sad.