Demon of the Week

I have just this very moment realized the distinct connection between those annoying and patently untrue messages people forward and the news items which appear regularly and do nothing but incite distrust and fear.

They are one in the same.

People have a certain need to fear something, and when the right sort of combination of 'facts' and words happen upon them, they believe it because they want to. They repeat it without questioning it. Everyone has their own little set of beliefs in human nature, beliefs in who is bad, fears of how the world will get to them... and those fears are exploited regularly by... whom?

There are people who simply get a charge out of pushing your buttons. We're familiar with these kinds of people.

But at the next level, how is it that we are made to be afraid of nonsense in the news? Is there an Orwellian nonsense-news generating committee somewhere in charge of keeping the public busily disagreeing with each and fearing each other?

It really seems to me that if we were not so involved with:

being in debt,
buying junk we don't need,
fretting over how we were not dieting,
failing to be there for our kids,
hating people who were different than us for whatever reason,
worrying about the civil rights of people in a country we will never step foot in,
fearing the loss of our precious consumer goods,
possible destruction by meteorite,
invasion by killer bees or ants or toxic gasses,
death by gigantic volcano,
cellulite,

- if we all stopped bothering with that, our current political leaders would all end up in prison. But we're too busy, so, they get away with the truly absurd, and we worry about trivialities which may or may not be true.

So perhaps there is such a news-generating committee somewhere.

Spam, advertising, tv news- it's all there for your insecurities. What do you find yourself prone to believe?