Wednesday, December 26, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
Fear
Americans have become
a fearful lot. And I really do
mean scaredy-cats, a bunch of
whimpering, simpering, cow-
ardly lions afraid of every-
thing from chocolate milk to
clowns, from fake eyelashes
(it’s a thing) to 11-year-
old playground bullies.
I’m not sure how this hap-
pened, but fear has become
a pervasive element in our
culture. It’s virtually every-
where, replacing optimism
and confidence in the same
way that “feeling” has
replaced “thinking.”
The lawyers have a lot
to do with that, because we
have millions of them. And
because we have millions of
them competing to salve our
“feelings” with remedies in
cash settlements, we have
become the most litigious
society in the history of the
world.
We’ve done that without
pausing to consider that liti-
gation may be — in many,
many cases — more of a
problem than a solution. So
a lot of people are just afraid
of being sued, about some-
thing, sometime, by some-
one, which is probably legiti-
mate because anyone can sue
anybody, at any time, for any
thing.
And they often do.
Maybe the fear culture
is somehow based in the
knowledge — mostly not
talked about — like the bad
uncle with prison tats who
shows up drunk at Christmas
— that we are essentially
bankrupt as a nation, running
on fumes and easy credit
to rack up bills that no one
alive, apparently, has any
intention of ever paying off,
so that the bill for the Great
Baby-Boomer Dine and Dash
will someday land on our
grandchildren like a cartoon
safe falling out of the sky.
Anyway, here’s a brief
survey of things Americans,
by their own admission, were
scared of last week: romaine
lettuce, Facebook, the Dow
Jones Average, cheerlead-
ing injuries, chemtrails,
aliens (galactic or planetary),
drones, staying in Syria, leav-
ing Syria, staying in Afghan-
istan, leaving Afghanistan,
Mad Cow disease, witchcraft
in elementary schools, Kel-
lyanne Conway, inflation,
deflation, Amazon’s Alexa
telling children to murder
their foster parents, drought,
planetary warming, plan-
etary cooling, credit-card
debt, flooding, tornados,
volcanoes, tick-borne dis-
eases, Trump, MAGA hats,
Pelosi, Rand Paul, people
with guns, people banning
guns, North Korean EMP
bombs, robot surgeons, opi-
oids, China, Mueller, ISIS,
Russia, ANTIFA, cancer, cof-
fee, roundabouts, heart dis-
ease, walls and slats, people
from Portland, people from
Honduras, angry deer, white
supremacists, people from
California, self-driving cars,
bears, Boy Scout jamborees,
forest fires, football players,
Elon Musk, and Vladimir
Putin.
Reading forensically, it
appears that at least some
Americans are afraid of all
these things at the same
Dr. Thomas R. Rheuben
General, Cosmetic, Implant
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time, every day. Other citi-
zens have more concentrated
fears, such as the folks who,
in one California city, called
911 over 27,000 times — to
complain about gas-powered
leaf blowers.
Which is sad because
there was a whole lot more
Scary Stuff crammed into the
big bag of potential night-
terrors, including some hor-
ror stories about radioactive
pigs and wolves roaming
around Europe — but for our
purposes what happens in
Ukraine stays in Ukraine.
It’s tempting to say some
of that fear is really just
anger, but fear works because
those emotions share the
same mother, which is a lack
of control over other people,
circumstances, or things.
A lot of this contemporary
fear-mongering, and the sub-
sequent fear-based living and
decision-making, is driven
by media saturation, which
is a for-profit business, after
all. And fear-widgets sell, so
editorial decisions are made
easy when the choice falls
between a story about a kid
raising money for his pet
turtle with a broken beak, or
one about a factory robot that
went inexplicably rogue and
killed some hapless fellow on
the assembly line.
Television editors will, on
occasion, squeeze a feel-good
piece in between the terrors, a
kind of synthetic filler — like
a slice of American cheese in
a bad ham sandwich — but
generally book-end a broad-
cast with more breaking
news meant to terrify us in
various ways even though,
in our typically humble and
generally mundane lives, we
are virtually powerless to
do anything at all about the
Great Big Fears Consuming
the World.
So the fear and anxiety
stories just get pumped into
our bubbles every day with
precious few ways to vent
them off, unless you are
into goat-yoga, or just pre-
fer to hide in mom’s base-
ment blazing away on some
Humboldt Fatso and listening
to Tony Robbins tapes on an
endless loop.
Which, when you think
about it, is kind of a strange
way to live.
Not that fear is ALL bad.
Gavin de Becker, author of
“The Gift of Fear,” writes
convincingly that fear is also
an evolutionary advantage,
giving us a kind of genetic
forewarning of dangerous
people, places, or things.
Which would be more true
if we weren’t being condi-
tioned to believe that virtu-
ally everything around us is
scary, or potentially scary, or
that we are all living on the
precipice of some cultural,
political, and ecological
cataclysm.
There are people among
us who think they have all
the answers. They don’t.
Blowhards and know-it-alls
are really just people over-
come by fright who have
morphed into frenzied tent-
revivalists, and who would
love to baptize you in the
church of their nightmares.
So maybe in this holiday
season, when very powerful
forces at work in our culture
would like to scare you into
thinking the same way they
do, we can all just turn off the
big global horror show and
take a long-overdue break
from constantly crying wolf.
May Joy be your gift at
Christmas, and may Faith,
Hope and Love be your
treasures in the New Year.
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