You Don't Scare Me

Fear is a powerful thing. It will motivate you to do a lot of things- to part with a lot of things. When everything's good, it's not too hard to be rational and think critically. When someone threatens you with the loss of something, it's hard to not be irrational and act emotionally. This happens everywhere from sports to entertainment to politics. You hear how something might be lost unless certain conditions are met, then everybody panics and meets those conditions.

There are too many examples. Lately there has been a lot of labor strife in sports, with one league after another venturing to the brink. There was that grocery store scare as well, and a number of television shows are said to be at risk of going off the air for lack of efficiencies in budgeting. In every case we get scared and start wringing our hands, praying that somehow we could do something to avert calamity. If only we could sit at the negotiating table or just produce the needed money!

Always a solution seems to be found, and we breath a sigh of relief. I do so less and less. More and more, I find myself thinking very cynically. These tempests begin to feel very manufactured and avoidable. I wonder whether we were all just made to be scared so that somebody could get what they want. It feels like some kind of sleight of hand, or like someone set fire to the house so they could raid the safe and run out unimpeded.

Well, I'm not so frightened anymore. I don' think we're really at risk of losing anything important in such cases. I figure that it's always one of two things. Either it's a big bluff, because of course they're not actually going to go through with something like defaulting on the national debt, or it's something that we don't need to be concerned one bit about losing. These people are going to have to find someone else to scare, because I'm getting awfully tired of it.