Words are Medicine

Viral Fear is the oil for the American drive shaft.

It moves the market because it moves us to buy. We believe we need something because we get convinced that the absence of it puts us at grave risk—for attack, hemorrhoids, loneliness, heart failure or social scorn. We pour more pharmaceuticals into our bodies than ever, yet we have more heart disease, panic attacks, isolation, and asthma in this country than ever before. And with all the surveillance, bombs, and barricades we’ve erected around us we are still the most frightened we’ve ever been—which is exactly where Madison Avenue wants us.

Because when we’re afraid, we’re needy. And when we’re needy like that, we’ll buy anything. Including bad ideas.

The second American disease follows the first in both style and substance. It is consumption–not the tubercular one that plagued the weak, poor and malnutritioned in the late 1800's, but the modern, psychological version of it in which we never have enough.

What's in your garage? In your cabinets? When you walk through your neighborhood, what do you see in their yards, their storage areas? How much of it do you think you (or they) actually use in  a year, in a decade? My assumption–if my experience is anything like yours–is that you use very little of what you have. And that you need even less than that.

This is the delusion of I NEED MORE. It is unrestrained avarice and growth. We guzzle without compunction. On the physical level, you have cancer, psoriasis and diabetes. Our garages are filled to overflowing, but on the emotional and spiritual level we are becoming bankrupt.

The origin of it is subtle. You—me—we identify with what we HAVE more than we identify with who we are and what we offer to our communities. If we don’t have the clothing, the car, or the house that reflects our chosen image to the world, we have nothing. Worse, we ARE nothing.

It is fear based from start-to-finish. Imagine the way America does business, exchanging credit cards, credit card offers, percentages of interest, interest reports, people with their heads in their hands weeping over piles of bills, advertisers for more credit.

Because of our need for MORE, our whole culture is now based on one of the few economic devices the Bible completely disallows: usury. Yet, we can’t stop putting things on credit. We can’t sit still. We can’t be with one another quietly. We have to keep buying, acquiring, collecting.

Our shelves and stomachs are filled but our hearts and souls are empty. We sit alone and sip on our Prozac cocktails.

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