"Is it safe to eat out anymore? More on the outbreak of e-coli at your favorite restaurant right after this word from our sponsor..."
"A bacteria outbreak in an L.A. hospital has caused the closing of an entire unit...Should you be worried about getting medical care? You can follow this story with us and know what your risks are in just a minute. We'll have the details right after these words." (The words that followed came from the manufacturer of an anti-bacterial gel. Convenient?)
"Your personal information is no longer personal. It starts with your name and your driver's license... Life comes at you fast. That's why Nationwide offers identity coverage."
In compiling these examples, I realized I couldn't even type fast enough to catch all the fear-inducing posturing whether it was coming in the form of advertising or news. And I type at nearly 100 words-per-minute. It was relentless, incredibly fast and awfully captivating.
That last part was the worst part, the tragic joke of it: Not only are we afraid, but we're fascinated by our own fear. A culture of rubberneckers, we tune in and get turned on. We go to horror movies, jump off bridges tethered by a bouncing rubber rope and suckle on scandal. For those whom that is no longer enough, we now announce a new gift from cable television: the Fear Channel. I kid you not. You are now free to terrify yourself 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Casting Out Fear. From that first bite of that first fruit, people have been afraid. And there has been a remedy for it as we heard in the Sermon on the Mount: "Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them...And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life?" The remedy, the antidote to viral fear and generalized anxiety is faith and a reversal of the value system that has America in a choke-hold.
In one way or another we are commanded over and over and over again to "fear not" and trust God. In fact, we hear it in exactly those words every time an angel appears to someone in the Bible, usually at those precarious times when God is calling for a leap of commitment or a decision to follow Him over an abyss. Fear and faith seem unable to co-exist, incapable of being released in the same breath. Yet, we know that fear is a reasonable response to certain situations and that the greatest of Biblical and historical characters have been afraid. Mary and Joseph were afraid in the manger. Moses was afraid when he was called to lead an entire people into a new world. So, what does that mean? How can we be told not to be afraid when we're such fragile, needy beings in a fallen world and even the greatest of us have succumbed?
From my point of view, not all fear is the same. There is the fear that furthers our survival and there is the fear that is futile. The latter is a threat of monumental proportions in our culture. It is pathological, pervasive and addictive. It keeps us from doing that which we need to do to survive (or to thrive) and enables us to justify that which we ought never to do. It undermines faith and corrupts our thinking. We see enemies where there are none and ignore the enemies that are truly mortal dangers. We buy and collect incalculable mountains of "stuff" to surround ourselves with ourselves, hoping to keep out the reality of our condition – that we are mortal, that a life without meaning is wretched and that we are rapidly becoming couch-ensconced cowards. We watch television for hours a day, play video games until our brain scans are radically altered at the cellular level and do what Adam did while the serpent wrapped itself around Eve's soul: We hide.
The moral of the story is clear: If we don't step out from behind the tree and take care of business, the story will be repeated and this time Americans will be playing the leading roles.
J. Acosta is a writer and practicing clinical psychotherapist. She has written two books: THE WORST IS OVER (2002, Jodere) and THE NEXT OSAMA (2006). Her third is due to come out some time next year and she is currently in the middle of her fourth.
She has her practice in New Mexico with her canine therapeutic assistants. She has worked with anxiety and fear in patients for twenty years. She has watched it, felt it, wrote about it, and helped heal people from it. As a result, she has learned a few things about fear, particularly that growing epidemic she calls VIRAL FEAR.
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