May 29th, 2009 Good Fears and Bad Fears
I decided to stop watching the news on television, they seems to only have leading report stories that have the qualities of ‘fear-mongering.’ And the reason for this is, apparently, we like it. Every now and then they have a ‘feel-good’ story, but it’s usually at the end of the newscast. Fear is an emotion that has two sides. There is Good fear and Bad fear. What the news usually reports and preys on is our irrational destructive fears. Like when my friend called me while she was staying at a Palace Hotel India, right after she arrived and unpacked, she turned on television to watch the India news and saw that there were terrorist blowing up and killing people around Mumbai, and how she won’t dare leave her room. It was her first time in India and she wouldn’t leave her room.
Normally, a good fear comes from an actual physical threat. There is the element of physical fear, like for our personal safety and the safety of our family and friends. A healthy fear. A type of fear as old as the world and is instinctual. We are born with it. Research shows that a babies only instinctual fear is that of falling. As we grow older the fear develops into the more familiar ‘fight or flight‘ reaction fear that our mind will send chemicals into our body to give us energy to think and act quickly to a perceived threat.
As humans, we have evolved to a different type of fear that has become common since we adopted a less strenuous, less dangerous lifestyle. So, we are pre-occupied with the distractions of the news media and the entertainment industry. I truly believe that the new media are in the business of franchising fear, they want to paralyzes us with fear. Wants to make us want to give up and quit. To not even try. They make the world seem like a truly fearful place to be. The only place we have to live, they want us to fear it. So, I stopped watching the news, stopped reading the paper. And found that my stress levels have reduced immensely and my views of the world I live in is a less scary place then I thought.
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