The Fear Factor

This morning, temporarily freed from the need to go
to the office, we were watching Fox news. We confess to a weakness for
Fox, as opposed to CNN, which has become our parents news network, and
hell, we are past 50. Fox is hipper, faster and less attached to that annoying
illusion of objectivity.

Anyway, we swear we heard the promo announcer say "The
next terror attack is coming soon! Which US city will be hit?", like the
teaser to a coming attraction, like
"Which desperate housewife will die?" Anticipating the ratings pop, no doubt.

We opened the Boston Globe, recently retrieved from our
frigid front  porch. The
top story, front page above the fold, was
to the effect that a terrorist attack on a liquefied natural gas tanker (photo above)
— via methods such as internal sabotage, a rocket-propelled grenade,
a kamikaze flight, or a USS Cole-style suicide boat ramming — would cause
”major injuries and significant damage to structures" a
third of a mile away and could cause second-degree burns on people more
than a mile away.  It was illustrated by a map of East Boston, Everett
and surrounding towns showing the blast footprint for each level of damage.

Last week the departing US secretary of health and human
services said that he was surprised that terrorists had not
yet targeted the food supply. He practically issued an invitation and a
roadmap to potential psychos.

What the hell is going on here? Obviously, we are living
in a dangerous world, but it is becoming equally obvious that the American public
is being worked into a paranoid dither with constant warnings about the
fantastic variety of disaster which could befall us at any moment.  It’s
like the government and the main media have adopted and adapted that successful Hollywood standby,
the
horror/disaster
movie, for their own nefarious ends.

The result is that the country is deeply disturbed and
unsettled, mostly on a subconscious level. An atmosphere of cold unfocused
fear is permeating the American landscape, shadowing our days and haunting
our dreams. The most important lesson of the recently completed political
campaign is that the politics of fear trumps the politics of hope.

This is especially true when the electorate has as much
to lose as ours does. How many of our liberties will we be willing to do
without to preserve our standard of living? The politics of hope may have
a chance, once in a while, in the pockets of
poverty festering
like
the
pox
on the
face
of
the planet, where the only loss the people have to fear is the loss of
their lives, since the own nothing else.

But in America, hope doesn’t have a chance. With the national
psyche already deeply unsettled by the creeping subconscious realization
that we are hogging ten times our share of the world’s resources, and that
most of the rest of the human race hates us for it, the unspoken amorphous
fear is the realization that WE COULD LOSE IT ALL, in an instant, in one
insane
act, in a nightmare role reversal where the master becomes the slave. Payback
is a bitch.

The fear is not overt, but it is ever present.  It
tugs and gnaws at our minds. And it is the most powerful psychological
and political force in the land today. Are we in the killing zone? How
can we know? It could happen at any moment. In
the
meantime,
why do
we
have
the feeling we are being set up for a fall? What
are they
preparing
us
for?
We are
trying
not to
be paranoid, but will someone please explain what all those guys in black
suits are doing in the bushes?

Stay tuned…..