Be afraid, be very afraid

It’s been a while since pirates reigned with terror on the coast of Florida, or since natives were slaughtered and white soldiers lost their scalps out on the plains. One no longer speaks of gunslingers and outlaws, and on the surface, the country has moved on. You can still see the wagon tracks on the trail from Dodge City to Santa Fe, but you can safely walk along these tracks without fearing for your life.

Most Americans live in pretty safe surroundings – the rural areas, the exurbs, the suburbs, the small towns – even many larger cities are overwhelmingly safe. Many places people still don’t lock their doors; they know all their neighbors, there isn’t really anything to be afraid of. There are of course grave exceptions, mainly in deprived urban areas, and there are random acts of senseless violence even in the places normally considered safe. There is gang warfare, there are madmen with guns who go on wild shooting sprees. There are all the private tragedies: premeditated murders, accidents, diseases. I am not denying that. Some things (or people) are dangerous. A certain fear – or awareness of danger – is a healthy thing.

But somewhere along the line in American culture, a healthy fear of danger seemed to develop into pure phobia, and this is so widespread that no one is embarrassed about being afraid. On house-shows on TV (i.e. House Hunters on HGTV, where real people look for a house to buy), people freely admit that they are such germaphobes that they can’t conceive of keeping a previously used toilet. They don’t just want to change out the toilet seat, they need to replace the whole shebang. Never mind that products like Lysol is promising to kill 99.9% of germs, but that is clearly not good enough. (Of course, 50 years of Lysol ads has probably had no small part in contributing to these fears. There is much money to be made from fear mongering.) I wonder what these people do when they visit friends, or when they stay in a hotel?

But toilets are scary contraptions, as this infomercial shows. You can get contaminated with the flu virus if you don’t close your toilet lid before flushing:

Germs are everywhere, and we are very afraid. If your child should pet a rabbit, you need a bottle of hand sanitizer on hand. In fact, you always need hand sanitizer on hand. Children are encouraged not to hug each other at school, in case one of them can pass on something nasty to another. And all hell breaks loose if a child finds something on the ground and puts it in his mouth! The horror of it! (My son decided to taste-test a maple leaf on the school grounds during recess. I got a call from the school nurse and had to come pick him up so I could monitor him in case something bad happened.)

American children are so sterilized and sanitized that asthma and allergies are at unprecedented levels. By keeping the children away from germs, the germs have become more dangerous to them. Zero exposure leaves you vulnerable; this is now a fairly well accepted notion.[i] But still we keep fighting the germs with chemicals.

However, germs are just one of the things threatening our children in this big, bad, scary world. In fact the whole world is a threat to their welfare, and any possibly foreseeable danger needs to be taken into account before one can do anything. Swings are disappearing from playgrounds – because sometimes kids can fall off, or they can hit other children while swinging. You can’t buy sweatshirts with drawstrings (they can get strangled) or cotton flannel pajamas (they burn fast if there is a fire). Kids are generally not let out of their parent’s sight, for fear of kidnappings or assaults or accidents. If you as a parent leave your child sitting in your car in the parking lot while you run a quick errand, you can get prosecuted and jailed. (And no, I am not talking about the infants left forgotten in a hot car for hours, or the kids sitting locked in a car outside the casino, again for hours. Those are tragic cases that should be dealt with accordingly.) The same if you leave your 8 year old child to play at the playground while you do something else.

So people want open plan houses where they can see their children at all times; their front yard is off limits for playing (too close to the road? they can be seen by kidnappers?); and the back yard needs to be fenced in. There in the back yard every middle class American family has their own playground, safely removed from outside threats. Never mind that most of these expensive swing sets with forts and slides and sandboxes are mostly unused – I guess most children don’t find it much fun to play alone; at least that goes for my kids.

The kidnapping scare – that a stranger should abduct your child – is one of the most long-lived media hypes that hang like an axe over an American parent’s conscience. [ii] Sadly these things do happen, but the chance of it happening is really miniscule, and to me it seems like the fear is ruining childhood for American kids. There is so little freedom to explore, to make mistakes, to be reckless and wild and learn to take chances, to go out and discover the world and be brave and strong and self-sufficient. There are voices of reason that attempt to put things into perspective – one of my favorite proponents for this kind of reason is Lenore Skenazy, the mom who got infamous for letting her 9 year old ride the NYC subway alone to school, and who started the movement Free range kids[iii] – but statistics and reason don’t seem to make much of a chip into the phobic fear of stranger danger and life’s unpredictable twists and turns.

In general, your house and home is a likely target for scare tactics. I already mentioned the cleaning agents’ fight against germs. Exterminator companies pry on your fear of termites eating up the structure of your house, and security companies makes your fear of strangers into big business. This well-produced piece by Brinks Security is worth watching:

There are of course many more things to be afraid of, but one area I find particularly poignant is the world of politics – especially when it comes to TV advertising. The US is one of the few countries in the world where political TV advertising is unrestricted, and look where that has brought us! Every issue can boiled down to a sound-bite (no need for analysis or, god forbid, some real facts), and the electorate is called to duty by appealing to their basest fears.

This all started back in 1964, with the so-called “Daisy” attack ad from Johnson’s presidential campaign. The Democrat Johnson was running against the Republican Goldwater who was fiercely anti-Soviet, and there was a substantial concern that he would lead the country into war against the Russians. The ad, which was controversial and consequently was run just once, brings this message across very effectively:

The ad addressed the deepest fears of the public, and they voted accordingly. Johnson won a landslide victory, carrying 44 states. Naturally, the ad is not the whole explanation for that, but the ad certainly illustrates the tone of his campaign, and the campaign had a certain effect on the outcome.

The effectiveness of this kind of fear campaigning has surely spawned a big and wide tradition. In races big and small one constantly sees ads where the same kind of scare tactics are employed, short statements about an impending menace is read with a boomingly serious voice and dramatic music, much like a trailer for a horror movie. The “phone call in the night” from Hillary Clinton’s primary contest against Obama is another classic:

And now, of course, the fear-mongers are having a field day with ISIS and ebola; very classic choices for a phobia. They are both foreign, unpredictable and potentially fatal. And statistically very, very unlikely to have an actual impact on your life.

Somehow, I have a feeling we would all be better off if we managed to put the fears where they belong.

fear