Did you that hear Osama bin Laden has a suitcase of nukes?
A Democratic president will lure more bogeymen wielding box cutters into the U.S.
A Republican will have the country at war forever.
Climate change will submerge half the U.S. and scorch the rest.
Katrina was an infant’s sneeze compared to this year’s hurricane season.
Overpopulation will poison America’s melting pot.
Not that it matters, really, because on the first Friday the 13th in 2029 a 400-meter- wide asteroid will pummel Earth and cause mass extinction.
Thieves will steal your identity.
Illegal immigrants will steal your job.
Recession is here and will steal everything else.
Tap water can kill you.
So can that school cafeteria hamburger.
And your kid’s Talking Elmo doll.
That plastic water bottle? Cancer.
Cellphone? Worse than smoking.
Immunizations cause autism.
Every fish in the sea will soon die.
Perverts are lurking in every corner of cyberspace.
Violent, meth-addled hoodlums are stalking your kids and eyeing your stuff.
Killer bees are attacking Texas.
Burmese pythons — 20 feet long and 250 pounds — will soon be slinking through the South.
Doomsday isn’t if, but when.BOO!
Scared? Well, then, you’re five times more likely to die of heart disease.
Life has always been hard for the glass-is-half-full crowd. Especially for optimists who like to stay informed. But has there ever been a generation so bombarded with fear-mongering? Sure, the kids in the early ’60s crawled under their desks, but this generation is told the threats are everywhere — in the refrigerator, in the woods, in the air, on the Web, at the border and on the streets. To be truly safe, you should stay in bed.
Just don’t let the bedbugs bite. (Oh wait, you can’t stop bedbugs.)
It is a histrionic global dread fueled by so many sources, including the latest round of ego-heavy politicos aiming to surf the tidal wave of fear into an office where only they can save us.
Fostering fear is hardly a new political tactic. It hit full stride in 1964 with a televised campaign ad by presidential hopeful Lyndon Johnson featuring a nuclear explosion in the pupil of a freckled girl plucking a daisy. For the next two-plus decades, Americans lived with the threat that some guy in Moscow had his hand hovering over a red button that could kill every American not once but three times.
The culture of fear continues today, with perpetually elevated terror alerts, stern warnings to stock up on duct tape, the sky-is-falling diatribes and be-very-afraid edicts from, well, everyone. Dire predictions that the economy will crumble if a liberal wins. Or that American society will dissolve into a roaming orgy if gays wear wedding bands. Or that big business will soon be dining on the flesh of the poor. Or that the sky will soon rain fire — which illegal immigrants will then use to torch the country.
When did leadership become so defined by breathlessly inducing fear? The best leaders today can foment fright like no other, plucking our deepest anxieties until it’s virtually inhuman to support anyone else. If we don’t embrace change, say the handsomely tailored Debbie Downers at the podium, we’re doomed. Except if it’s Mother Nature-type change. That change is bad. It will cook us, freeze us.
It’s an institutionalized and endless epidemic of fear based largely on courage-sapped Americans’ ever-decreasing levels of acceptable risk and accountability. If it’s even remotely dangerous, someone — or more specifically, “they” — should fix it. Or we’ll sue.
My pal Kevin looks at every rapid he’s about to paddle or slope he’s about to ski and sees nothing but overwhelming darkness. “Yeah, you can ski that,” he says. “But if you miss that turn, you’ll somersault face first into that tree right there. No way you’d live. No way.”
I don’t play much with Kevin anymore.
I wish it were that easy with the rest of the always-whispering Wormtongues and worst-case-scenario sculptors. After all, fear is big business. A ballooning population of Nervous Nellies is fertile ground for big profits. The Department of Homeland Security’s budget for 2007 was $35.6 billion. That’s triple the homeland security spending for 2001.
Even the strong business minds in a capitalist world can be tapped for evil. So said Attorney General Michael Mukasey, earlier this year in a chat with Silicon Valley execs.
“Every new technology we create can be abused,” he said, “whether it’s a common identity thief looking for a new way to steal your bank account information, or an international terrorist looking to advance a murderous plot.” So take that, entrepreneurial terrorist helpers.
In 2003, the federal Operation Liberty Shield program began compiling a list of national assets susceptible to terrorist attack. What started with 160 sites became 77,000 by 2006.
It’s all designed to keep Americans alert, supposedly. Fear is a motivator for vigilance. Or is coddling the calamitous a tactic to keep the masses malleable? Is fear-mongering itself a form of terrorism that keeps us trembling and collared? A political tool for assembling more power, leaving the body politic cowering in the bosom of the all-powerful, all-knowing mother state, pleading: “Save us from nature and terrorists and lead paint and daft bankers.”
Whatever happened to the days of exuberant American confidence, when even at the nadir of a knee-buckling depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said: “This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. . . . The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Living in cold sweats isn’t living. Paralysis by analysis isn’t living, either.
Bid adieu to the merchants of gloom and go for it. Aim higher. Whistle.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I will fear no evil.”
Jason Blevins can be reached at (303) 954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com
