Things I was/should be afriad of.

I wrote in an earlier blog post that we all secretly want to be afraid and the media/government obliges us.

Today I got my swine flu shot (didn't hurt at all, but later felt like someone punched my shoulder). It's still all over the news - how the swine flu is going to kill us all because there are vaccine shortages.

I thought, "What diseases/sicknesses did the media try to make us afraid of in the 80s and 90s?"

Well, I'd say it was AIDS in the 1980s. When I was in elementary school everyone was going to die of AIDS. Guaranteed. Then AIDS faded away to "HIV", which became controllable by a cocktail of drugs.

Then in the 90s I had trouble remembering what I was afraid of. Of course I was in university, largely oblivious to world events. Too young to be worried about anything in particular.

Someone said it was Mad Cow disease. Or Ebola virus. Or the autism explosion. My co-worker said there were a whole bunch of food poisoning concerns in the 1990s. E-coli, etc.

Then in the 2000s it became a series of exotic flu diseases SARS, bird flu, swine flu.

What sickness is next? I want to know what I should fear.

We want to be afraid of things.

You know how sometimes you want to go see a scary movie? You get in the safe theatre and eat your safe popcorn, and then you watch this terrifying movie? And even though it's terrifying it's also kind of fun and exciting?

That's how we want it to be all the time. We want to be scared, but safely scared. We want to be scared for other people. We want to be told what to do by experts to lessen our fear.

The media has realized this and tries to make us as scared as possible. The media tries to satisfy our needs. Newspapers or movies or TV shows or news shows that scare you are rewarded more through attention, ratings, gossip and ultimately money.

The government is happy! It knows that we want to be scared so they gladly oblige. They pass laws and spend our money to protect us. This gives them more power.

Corporations are happy to scare us as well. They can sell more products and services if we're scared.

So it's pluses all around. We want to be scared and we ask the media, government and business world to scare us. The media, government and corporations try their best to scare us and, in turn, benefit through more attention, power or money.

That's why today there are murderers everywhere, wars, impending natural disasters, pandemics, terrorists, rapists, corrupt governments and a million other things that will ruin our lives forever.