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We live in an age where it has become a full-blown and evidently an extremely profitable industry. We are becoming the eager customers of fear, or perhaps I should say eager victims.
How many doses of fear do you receive daily? Doctors and "researchers" invent threats of new illnesses which you are urged to fear you "may" have. But have no fear, these good Samaritans tell you, they can now offer you another pill, another formula, another solution - for a price. And for some reason, because these things are not generally available over the counter, they cost a lot more. But, hey, they can deliver them right to your door. They even want to make money sending you monthly or even daily news alerts. Every alert comes chock full of new discoveries to stoke the flames of our fears. What a deal!
Political operatives feed us daily fears - that our very belief systems are in danger of collapse under the weight of a whole litany of things to fear. Congress is making it easier for illegals! The Chinese are eating our lunch! Terrorists are moving into our neighborhoods! The liberals are taking away our right to own guns and bringing Marxism to America. The Republicans are making Christianity the official religion of America and killing the last polar bear! There's some secret highway to hell that will make America a non-entity. Be a patriot, join our group! Donate now!
The news media does its best to capitalize on our fears. Look at the daily headlines. Kidnappers are lurking outside our windows trying to steal our babies. Rising gas prices will collapse the economy. Drive-by shootings are targeting us at random. The housing crisis will have half of America living in cardboard boxes under freeway ramps. The flu is worse this year - every year. The bird flu. Mad cow. STD's are everywhere. Airliners aren't safe. Every campus has loose cannons just waiting to go off and gun down another two dozen innocent students. The Federal Government can't protect us from 210 mph hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanoes. Subscribe to our news alerts. Join now!
Our children are not safe in school, we are not safe on the highways, in our offices, or napping in front of the tv. Learn why, open your account now!
Be afraid, be very afraid. There's mercury in our tuna, in the fillings in our teeth. There's rodent droppings in our cereal, dangerous fumes at the gas pump, bad chemicals in our tap water, and in the very air we breathe (cough-cough).
NO DOUBT MANY OF THESE THINGS ARE TRUE. But while it's understandable that we may fear some or all or none of them, why in hell should any of these fear merchants make a damn nickel off our fears? They are the lowest form of scoundrels. Profiting from fear. They are not modern day Paul Revere's. They are fear mongers. And I say damn them!
The way I see it, what we are experiencing in our culture is like this: did you ever do the child's science demonstration where you take a sheet of blank of paper, sprinkle a handful of fine steel shavings on it, then pass a horseshoe or bar magnet under the paper? Because of the way steel molecules are aligned, the tiny shavings easily form a "north" and a "south" pole - a negative and positive end. As the magnet passes beneath them, the filings will suddenly spin or turn on the paper until their poles align with the lines of magnetic force of the magnet; positive attracted to negative and visa-versa.
This is similar to how the force of human destiny works. I will cautiously avoid attributing the magnet to the hand of God. Let's just call it nature. The filings in this crude analogy represent people. The magnets are "new ideas." When the ideas pass through the world's population, people are attracted to them and line up, for reasons unknown. As they spin toward the magnet, a pattern emerges in the filings on the paper along the curving lines of force eminating from the magnet's poles. These formations on the paper are what we might call cultural "movements." But there are some bits on the paper which don't seem to be affected. These are non-magnetic bits, which in our analogy would be those of us who are "different" and do not follow the general sentiments of the elite sheeple in our culture for whatever our reasons may be.
If the magnet (or new idea) is strong enough, the attraction is virtually irresistible for the majority. Such movements sweep the world, change the prevailing sentiments of the majority, and we experience a new cultural era. Such movements have swept across civilizations many times in the past. Greek rationalism. The Enlightenment. The French Revolution, to name a few. Then there is The New Marxism and its attendant drug culture which exploded on the American scene during the 1960's, championed by so many of the "new thinkers" from Dillon to Leary to the Ginsbergs to the Beatles... or at least John and Yoko.
I believe we are now in just such a period of time. There is a major magnet passing through the aether around us - permeating the air and the thinking of so many of the world's people. The weak-minded sheeple are being attracted in great numbers to its poles. The rest of us resist it with all our might, screaming into the maelstrom, where no one but the like-minded seems to hear. I don't know if the magnet will pass again in the other direction, but if you look at it this way, as the lines of force of human destiny, you may find some relief from the unscrupulous merchants who are trying to capitalize on your fears.
Only when there is an equal or greater magnetic force pulling in the opposite direction, can these movements be reversed or at least stopped. In nature, almost always, an equal and opposite force somehow shows up to stabilize things. There is cause for intelligent concern today, but not for fear.
In the end, there may be nothing to fear other than, as FDR so succinctly put it, fear itself.
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