Based on Fear

I was feeding Patch this morning with the teevee on in the adjacent living room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw this young mother on the screen, calling out to her daughter in their backyard to come in for some sandwiches. The little one does and the mother, thankfully, arms the alarm and closes the sliding glass door. Awfully paranoid, I think, but I know what’s going to happen. There’s a startling crash as one of those unshaven thugs with bright white teeth you see only on prime-time detective shows punches his fist through the glass of another door, setting off alarms. The mother and girl embrace, trembling in fear, as the burgler-potential-rapist-and-murderer snarls at them, then high-tails it outta there. Whew!

The first thought in my mind was not, “Gee, we really need an alarm system for our house!” but rather, how much of our society is based on fear.

I think it’s a given, and I think you’ll agree with me, that a good portion of advertising plays on our fears. How much exactly, I don’t know, but I’d say it’s a majority, that is, greater than fifty percent. I suppose if I was doing this for some sort of college project, I could watch teevee for twelve straight hours, notebook in hand, and analyze each commercial (and I’d probably see close to 400 in that time period). But just think about the commercials you’ve seen recently. Just about all drug advertising is based on fear: fear you’ll get sick, fear you’re health is at risk. Now we’re seeing an influx of commercials playing on economic fears. Might lose you job, house, car, insurance, you name it. Buy this, subscribe to that, be proactive and call this 800 number and save yourself from a world of pain.

If this is starting to bother you, I recommend that you stop watching teevee. Can’t? Here’s the news you may not have heard: teevee watching is a “soft” addiction. You’re addicted. But that’s not what I want to talk about now.

It’s not just product marketing. It’s marketing from all sorts of areas of life. Take politics, for example. What’s a negative political ad, if not a warning to you to fear the sponsor’s opponent? Turn on any talk radio station, and at the heart of it, it’s all playing to your fears. Turn on the mainstream media nightly news. A little more subtle, perhaps, but still fear-based. Especially when the country’s run by someone they don’t like, as it was from January 2001 to January 2009. The terrorists hate us, the world hates us, everyone hates us and is out to get us. Nowadays, in addition to pirates and nuclear regimes and homicide bombers we have things that want to get us. H1N1 anyone?

Cultural wars market fear to us. Both sides, mine and theirs. However, in these broad movements I think the more hard-core the advocate, the more they jump right over fear and into hate. The relationship between fear and hate is easy in this equation. Hate is a naturally result of fear. I know it doesn’t hold water, but face it, we do not live in a rational, reasoned age. We live in an age of emotion. And fear is the strongest, followed by hate. At least in the minds of some.

Fear in itself, though, is not a bad thing. I think this kind of outlook wraps itself up in the proposition “God did not create anything bad, so our emotions can’t be bad.” What they can be, is signals. A sign that something needs to be done, a call to action. Afraid of something? That means you need to do something: get prepared, take corrective action, or even maybe just give it up to God. Hate something? Get thee to a confessional.

The problem with allowing fear to overwhelm you is that it tends to paralyze you. Not hard to let happen since our media (and thus, our lives) is awash in the f-word. Believe me, I ain’t too far away, personally, and I am grappling with economic and medical difficulties, much more than the average man on the street.

The first thing we all should do is turn off the teevee. Turn off the radio: commercial music stations and talk. Stop reading the newspaper. If there’s something urgent you need to know, your friends and family will let you know. I found out about 9/11 from a librarian that brisk Tuesday morning. As an aside, you know what some of the worst offenders are? Health magazines. They’re loaded with drug ads! Don’t subscribe to them unless you want to be convinced you’ve got diseases you’ve never heard of.

Instead, nourish your mind. Feed it. It’s starving, you know? Read a good book. If all you like are trashy novels, so be it, but stretch yourself every now and then. Throw a CD on the stereo. Call your friends and talk about things that really matter, things that you can affect, not just things that can affect you. Try it. And you know what else? There’s magical truth at the bottom of that cliché, silence is golden. Try to discover that.

If you have a Bible, you may want to read this verse, and think about it now and then:

Philippians chapter 4, verse 8.