DO NOT BELIEVE IN ANYTHING OUT OF FEAR!

Has anyone besides me noticed how all of the media has become nothing more than a panic inducing machine used to propigate unfounded fears throughout our society? From television shows like 24 about terrorist plots and attacks, to news reports about murder, child abduction, child molestation, robberies, diseases, to watch television has become nothing more than an immersion in a paranoia factory. It apparently gets the networks ratings, the highest rated shows are show like C.S.I., shows where someone dies every week. I myself am a fan of good crime and mystery fiction but this goes way beyond that, we now live in what the Late, Great Hunter S. Thompson called "A Kingdom Of Fear". It seems to me that people want this, as odd as that sounds, that having something to fear some how gives them an identity. It gives them structure, apparently not fearing anything is what many Americans are afraid of most! The myopic, conservative climate alive in the country is using this and in particular the xenophobic fear the "evildoers", whomever they may be, are out to get you. The media concentrates on stories of one missing girl for months while children die everyday in Baghdad and that's just a drive by story on the incessant scroll on the bottom of your TV screen. Terrorists, murderers, rapists, SARS, Bird Flu, the airwaves are saturated with these stories when the reality is that you are a million times more likely to die in a car crash than from any of these things, but people take absurd chances in their cars everyday as they make their way home to cower in fear of so called "internet predators" or imaginary "monsters" waiting outside their bedroom window to snatch their kids and steal their SUV. And, oh, The White House loves it, the need to be protected that this paranoia engenders gives them the freedom to shred the Constitution and start Wars for no reason than other to expand their power, and to have most of this country quivering behind their pseudo-machismo posturing. But, sorry, it doesn't affect me, and there are many others who doesn't affect either. This is personal, but for many years I had severe Panic, OCD, and Anxiety problems, still have some of them but medication, life experience and therapy have helped me tremendously, they still creep in from time to time but I can recognize the symptoms and dismiss it for the mindless fear it is. I lost A LOT OF TIME in my life, fearing things for no logical reason, keeping myself shut in my house and away from the world. I do not do that ANYMORE, AT ALL. The only thing I fear now is missing something I should have been a part of because of a decision made out of mindless, irrational, illogical fear. FDR really made the ultimate statement about this, people quote his comment constantly but I wonder how many have ever really thought about it? The depths it covers? What he was facing when he said it? What he had gone through in his life before it? I'll quote it again, proudly as I end my comments on the Sad, Fearful State Of Our Nation, "The only thing we have to fear, is, fear itself!".

Love,

Mark