This is not a rhetorical question, though, according to my husband, it may be one that I come to regret asking in a public forum like this.

When I told him I was going to write an article about what happened in a gun shop the other day, he winced, "I hope you're ready for the fallout."

I guess I am, because I want to tell you the story and ask you what you think. I have come away from the whole experience with less "knowing" than I thought I had when I went in.

Allow me to start by saying I am a gun owner. I have several weapons and I respect all of them. I treat them with the care they demand and I am properly licensed. I have, thank God, always used them solely for target practice. I do not eat meat and do not hunt (though I admit that if there were ever an emergency and I needed to hunt in order to feed my family, I would reluctantly do so).

Mostly, I have them for home defense. I also, however, have a concealed carry permit. In my mind, carrying a gun in public has always had a dual consequence. It has not only implied that I can take care of myself, it has also meant that I have to be able and ready to to defend someone else if that is appropriate and necessary. I do not suffer from the delusion that I am a cop, nor am I secretly looking for opportunities to be a hero. I pray it never ever comes to that, but it is part of the deal (and responsibility) as far as I've been concerned.

The Case of The Sweltering Pup
In any event, this is what happened. It is an ordinary day. We are walking into a gun store to make a purchase. As we approach the building, we notice a dog languishing in a car with the windows only cracked open. It is in the mid-90's and the sun is searing. I point it out to my husband and he cringes, already knowing that I'm going to do something.

I have to sidetrack for a moment to acknowledge that he and I come from different worlds. In his, where everyone carried a gun, a person didn't get involved in another person's private affairs, even if those affairs were morally offensive. "Live and let live" was the Rocky Mountain tao by which he was raised.

My conscience was directed by different forces. What was perhaps the strongest code in my family was Edmund Burke's maxim: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." We not only believed in intervention, we actually intervened. We picked up clothes that other people dropped in department stores, stood between abusive parents and their babies, or wrote to congressmen and marched on Washington or the U.N.

When you saw something wrong, particularly something life-threatening, Justice was spelled with a capital J and doing nothing was not an option.

In any case, he was right about what was soon to happen. I walked into a store full of men with guns and told the clerk about the dog. "If you guys don't take care of it, I'm calling the cops." They said they would deal with him.

With a few questions, they found the man who needed to bring his dog to the firing range so he could leave him in a closed car in the parking lot in summer. They told him it was "unacceptable" and then they let him go back into the range to continue firing. The dog was still in the car. I waited a little while, then I went outside and called the police.

They came within about five minutes. And the guy, squealing and bleating in shamed protest, finally took his dog home, where hopefully he will live to see another day.

A Psychological Reality Check
I expressed my utter confusion about this to my husband when we got home. I couldn't understand how a store full of men with guns couldn't promptly and properly deal with a coward and a dog bully.

He said I misunderstood or misinterpreted gun ownership and that a good number of gun owners do not have guns out of any sense of duty and don't necessarily develop a sense of duty out of having guns. They have no bearing on one another. Many gun owners are profoundly honorable and benevolent people. But not because they have guns. Rather because they were raised well.

Most, he said, have guns for either sport or self-defense. It is a private matter. And it has no bearing on a sense of responsibility for anyone else.

I was surprised and still confused. But, but, but … I kept asking him: Didn't the having of a gun at least bring some semblance of duty to bear on a person? All he could do was say, "They're just not the same thing, is all."

So, I called a friend of mine, a detective and CSI whose opinion and intelligence I have come to trust. I told him the story and he laughed and asked me, "So, you're living where?"

I told him.

"And the culture there says what about privacy and animals?"

I shut my mouth and let him continue. I had already begun to see the light.

"To stand up, they'd first of all have to agree it's wrong. What's the mentality of the place you're in? To them, you're probably crazy. Plus, you think that because you know mostly people who do get involved — like cops or fire fighters or medics — that everyone with a gun is thinking the same way. They don't necessarily want to be involved at all and don't want anyone else to be involved with them. They're not all that interested in being helpful. They're interested in maintaining a perimeter between them and the rest of the world."

It came to this: guns don't make the man. Quite the reverse.

So, sadly, it seems that the world is still as apathetic as it was when Kitty Genovese was killed in a parking lot in Queens, NY with a dozen people watching, none of whom called 911. I may have to accept this, but I don't have to like it. Just like I will never become the person who walks past the panting dog or crying child in the car and clucks their disapproval without putting any punch in their protest. Some things are worth the risk and the alienation, as far as I'm concerned. And to tell you the truth, I'd do it again.

A while back I was visiting friends in a suburb of NYC. We are walking down the street minding our own business. A woman screeches up to the sidewalk, yanks her kids out of the car, screams at them and leaves them sitting and crying on a park bench. She takes off in the car. My friends and I look at each other in stunned silence for approximately .05 second and immediately corral the children. I call 911.

They put me on hold! I should've known right there that something was up. But, caught up in the moment, I stand there like a numskull and wait. The mother drives back up and whines about how no one understands how hard her life has been and how they were driving her crazy and it was just a little lesson…etc… I told her to back away and wait to give her story to the police.

As things went from terse to truly tense, out of the bushes pop up a sound man, a couple of 20 year old girls with release forms, and John Quinones from "What Would You Do?"

I guess we answered the question our way. And no one was carrying a gun.

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Everyone knows that sex sells.  The Romans knew it, the Greeks knew it, snake-oil salesmen on the American frontier knew it and we thought we knew it. It’s been the American way since America’s had a way. Sex was the king of Madison Avenue, the number one guarantee at the cash box, the Great Motivator.

Until now.

Because the American best-seller is no longer sex. It’s fear.

It's the holiday season and what better time to be bombarded with rapid fire ads designed to make us worry and buy. And what do these purveyors want us to worry about? Everything – what we eat, when we eat, what we wear, when we wear it, who we touch and what we can catch.

And with a sagging economy and sales way down, the sooner we worry the better.

The "self-improvement" ads that ordinarily start making us hate our bodies after January 1^st now start around Thanksgiving. What better spirit to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s than the spirit of Panic Present?

The message is the same everywhere. Be afraid. Be very afraid. By the end of the day we've been slipped about a hundred different fear mickeys and we are almost entirely unconscious about it.

The Christmas season has a special sort of viral fear that gets added to the mix of the usual doomsday, global warming, code red, “It Could Happen Tomorrow” programming. At this special time of redemption and renewal we get to fear the flu, unsightly blemishes and weight gain, loneliness, collagen loss, not being invited to the big parties, alcoholism and early onset Alzheimer’s, not to mention fallen meringues, sagging breasts and cervical cancer if we don’t get the vaccine now. Anxious about how anxious you are? Great. They’re selling a pill for that, too.

Viral fear pops up on your home page, too. Look at the ads on the internet. Really look. Instead of glossing over them or clicking at the latest new-and-shiny, look at what they’re really selling.

The Study of Fear and the "C" Word

In her study on fear in advertising, Lynn Kennedy profiled a billboard of Sammy Davis Jr. that looked like a tombstone. Next to a withered, sunken likeness of him was his date of birth and date of death. The headline read: The tobacco industry made him history.

Nothing strikes fear in the hearts of Americans as much as cancer. Many can’t even say the word itself and instead call it “the big C.” Pharmaceutical companies, “natural” food suppliers, vitamin manufacturers and home improvement specialists (air purification systems, for instance) work that fear carefully so that we buy what they sell.

The virus can mutate: It's not just a fear that we'll get "the Big C" or that we won't be attractive. It's the fear the "something might happen."

The entire insurance industry is based on profiting from the terror of the unknown. Prudential has based its whole campaign on that simple idea. They batter us with a slide show of the gloomiest, most gut-wrenching imagery then whisper to us so paternalistically: "Don't wait till it's too late."

And it works. People buy things they don’t really need and walk around worried about all the things they can’t do anything about.

After 60 years of Viral Fear media, what are Americans afraid of today?

They’re afraid of terrorists, of course. They’re afraid of attack just like we were in 1954.  We’re also afraid of germs, of erectile dysfunction, of not being successful, of robbers, of child abduction, of Alzheimer’s, of not having enough, of not being enough, of too much intimacy, of too little, of AIDS, of failure, of sunspots and solar radiation, of global warming, of dishwasher spots on our glasses and e-coli on our spinach. And we’re always worried about sex. (It's not number one anymore, but it still works.)

The greatest danger as I see it is that even when we use sex and scandal to sell, we’re still using fear to close the deals. The American limbic system has been mutated so that now fear, violence and sex have been fused. (Anyone who has done any research in forensics knows the fusion of aggression and sexuality is actually what happens in serial sexual sadist killers.)

Viral fear has capitalized on our culture’s weakest point – our urgent need for the quick fix. Viral fear encourages irrational thinking, greed, conformity, while it undermines self-worth, independence, connectedness with others and, worst of all, faith in God and a higher meaning in life.

So what are we to do?

The Power of Awareness

This is what Edward A. Merlis said way back in 1975 when he worked with the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee and devoted much of his time to advertising legislation. “He [the American] is bombarded at every flip of the magazine page, at every turn of the TV dial. Can he be proud that we now export our form of mental gang rape to the people of other countries? Advertising is a science, designed to attack people's weak spots in order to sell a product. Wolfbane may have been the antidote for vampires and wolfmen, but it appears that only knowledge and awareness are the antidotes for our 20th-century monster, advertising.”

He was right, of course. Knowledge is power and awareness can be life-changing not only in terms of what you’re willing to buy, but what you’re willing to swallow. Many years ago in another life I worked in advertising. I started as an assistant, worked my way up to copywriter. It was fun so long as I was playing the game and didn’t confront the ethical anomalies. One day the account executive sat down the creative team to discuss a new account. We would be developing an advertising and promotional campaign for a diet aid. It was designed to expand in the stomach and give the illusion of fullness as well as provide some stimulant action. (Meaning they would have gas, abdominal distension and the trots as well as increased heart rate, racing thoughts and agitation. But at least they wouldn’t eat.) The target audience for our advertising was young women from 14 to 35. As the account executive expanded the market profile, it became clear to me that they were targeting anorectic girls and women with body dysmorphic disorders, meaning women with delusional images of themselves. I mentioned this to my creative director who told me to go to my office and stay away from the account team. So I wrote an ad that would eventually become one of my last. On the top of the page was a close-up of the diet pill and the headline was FAT CHANCE.

Needless to say, they didn’t like the ad. But I did. And I’ve never regretted it. Not once. Knowledge may not be absolute power but it sure as hell packs a punch.

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They have also had it with the Viral Fear mongers.

In Geneva on September 4^th (Reuters), the World Health Organization (WHO) said it has only counted 2,837 deaths worldwide, and that it has not posed as serious a threat as they had feared.

Swine flu, which is not that different from ordinary flu, has not even approached the levels of exposure or danger we somehow go through every year without so much as a shudder.

Ordinary seasonal influenza kills between 250,000 and 500,000 people globally.

Yet, the media can't resist. They continue to issue predictions of dreadful suffering and worldwide panic, such as the one Stephanie Nebehay reported: “The virus could eventually infect 2 billion people or a third of the world’s population.”

Or the way Dr. T. Aloudat, Health Officer at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, believed he had to alert us to the awful possibilities: “We do have an emergency on our hands, an emergency of a scale different from what we have seen before in the modern era.”

Yet, according to Doctors Mullane and Hartfrom Danbury, CT., there have been reports that the H1N1 virus may actually be “immune” to Tamiflu, the drug most commonly prescribed by allopathic physicians.

As a result, even die-hard allopathic physicians are beginning to consider alternatives.

The Dean of Research and Education at the Beijing Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Mr. Tu Zhitao, stated, “We have found that Tamiflu is not sufficient….it weakens the body and has adverse effects on body tolerance. This treatment [the herbal combination]…works to build the body’s resistance.”

As it turns out, what we need to both resist the flu and the viral fear are the very same things:  sleep, good food, exercise, fresh air and some common sense. For those who know and have experienced the benefits of classical homeopathy, so much the better.

Taking care of ourselves, having meaning and purpose beyond the accumulation of gadgets and clothes that will be old news in 6 months, being accountable to ourselves for our own wellbeing—these things may be far more important than any vaccination.

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There has never been a nation of more deliberately sculpted beauty or a culture that has spent more money on beauty because it is convinced that it is ugly.

Women starve themsevles, men fill themselves with toxins in search of the on-command erection and everyone spends hours in front of mirrors terrified of being unattractive as if our sexual desirability determined our worth in the world and our chosen-status by God.

The truth is we haven't a clue about what is really attractive or beautiful. And we miss all the real opportunities for love which have far less to do with plumped lips than we'd like to think. After all, if it were just a matter of a little collagen, that would be a relatively easy fix. No one would actually have to work at intimacy, forgiveness, or sharing.

This disease has American by its chinny-chin-chin. And we're spending a fortune "fighting" it.

The last disease we'll talk about in this series is the "I'm-1-N-1" Virus or the Centerless Self.

This is the deepest expression of all the above pathologies. Because of all the others–the distortion of self and body-loathing, the sense of never being or having enough, the constant fear–we've also become exceedingly self-centered. Which is actually much more disastrous than it sounds because in our cultural psyche, there is no self and there is no solid center. We've become painfully insecure AND entitled. And when we don't get what we want–because we have no center, believe that we need that thing to fill up our emptiness, fear what may happen and loathe ourselves without it–we become violent.

The evidence for that is all over the news on a daily basis.

All these diseases, these cultural, collective delusions form a sort of intellectual and emotional breast milk for us and our children. They are the formula for how we think and how we live.

So what heals these delusions?

The first and most important antidote is Love. A spiritual Love. We have to know and learn to experience that we are not the center of the universe. Something else is and that IT centers us. We have no center without a relationship with the creator.

The second is Faith. When we can put our faith in something beyond ourselves, there is nothing to fear. When we can trust that a God who literally loves us is running the show, we can relax in the moment. We don't have to buy anything. We don't have to run away anymore.

The third and perhaps most difficult for Americans is a Correctness of Desire. The medicine for unrestrained want, irrepressible fear, and self-loathing is gratitude.

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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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People think that hypnotherapists only put people INTO trance. But a vastly significant percentage of the work a good hypnotherapist does is help people OUT of the unhealthy trances they’re in. Take a look around and see if it isn’t so! Who doesn’t have an IPOD attached to their head or a phone on their ear? Who isn’t spending hours staring at a TV or hooked into the internet. Our culture is now almost entirely media driven—we’re surrounded (all the time!) by advertising, media, and even music that tells us what we need, who to love, and what drugs to take to make us happy.

We don’t know who we are or what we’re doing here, but we are convinced that Viagra or a breast implant will somehow make it all better.

There are more pervasive cultural delusions that I can go through in one post but this is a brief list. We'll go through each one of them in a series.

1. Viral Fear

2. Moritis

3. The Eruption of Ugly

4.The I'm-1-N-1 Virus

5. Flushing's Disease

All of these are pandemic in proportion and are driving American culture headlong into the critical care unit. Is there a fix for them? I think so.  Stay tuned.

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The other day I was leading a group for multiple DWI offenders. One of them, a middle-aged man who was particularly angered by the bracelet he was being forced to wear on his ankle, the legal routines that filled his life, and the fact that he had to go to two A.A. meetings a week interrupted the group process with a rant on how he was being brainwashed.

I turned to face him directly, more amused and disbelieving than annoyed or angered. “And before this you were…” I opened my hands, motioning for him to fill in the blanks.

“I was sure as hell nobody’s puppet the way I am now,” he said indignantly.

“Really? So, all the times you picked up a drink and drove, knowing you could get slammed with one more DWI and put in prison, no one had you in his pocket? You were a totally free agent? And all the things you bought when you didn’t have the money and found yourself with debt you couldn’t pay, you weren’t brainwashed?”

He became quiet, but an interesting discussion ensued about the media, about fear, about the brainwashing that saturates us nearly every minute of every day. Most advertising is based on fear. The fear of not belonging, dying, pestilence, catastrophes, terrorist pandemics, war, drought, flood, erectile dysfunction, menopause, arthritis, driving an ugly car…the fears being drummed into our unconscious minds are innumerable.

Some people are so afraid, they go numb. This is particularly true where some traumatic episode has interfered with their lives. They drive too fast, drink too much, laugh too loud, get far too irritated too easily or remain blithely passive when they should be responding. Their thinking gets short-circuited. The cultural milieu does little to support their recoveries and in fact does a great deal to inhibit their healing. The culture—represented by the media—floods them yet further with messages promoting anxiety, infecting them again and again with their unique brand of viral fear that keeps them numb and buying. If you’re tired and can’t sleep, buy one of our pills. If you’re unable to be intimate with your partner, buy a new car to change your image. If your relationships are falling apart, don’t waste any time thinking about the reasons for it, come to our Happy Hour and meet someone totally new.
And on it goes.

What Should We Do?

1. Start with awareness. If we wake up and see the media’s message for what it is, we can become less susceptible, less automatic in our responses and hopefully more thoughtful. When an ad comes on or you see a product being promoted on a show or in a movie, remind yourself who and what put it there and why they’re spending so much money to do that. Awareness limits the impact of the messages that bombard us. If a sentence in an advertisement starts with “could,” “would” or “should” we can safely assume there’s an incoming fear missile. “Could it happen here?” “Could there be a bomb on New Year’s Eve?” “Should you get the vaccine now?” “Would you know what to do if…” Grammar is an extension of intent. Listen to what’s being said critically.
We can then remind ourselves that the way products and services are presented (as image, as icon, as identity or extension of self) is illusory and speaks to our fears and inadequacies more than our good judgment. They will never satisfy us in the way we are told they will. Be conscious of the truth and you will recognize the lies.

2. Do the obvious. We can limit the amount of time we (and particularly our children) spend with television, i-pods, game-boys or cyber-tennis and make a conscious effort to spend more time with one another. I do not for a second imagine that Americans will all start taking up Buddhist meditation, but having a few minutes a day without having our senses assaulted might be a good idea. The other day I met a friend at a place called the Hyatt Tamaya. It is a resort of sublime beauty, filled with roaring fires in handmade kivas, Native American artwork, sensual flute music and captivating views from every angle. I had to wait for her a while and sat near one of the fires when a man and his wife sat across from me. Presumably they’d come to the hotel together, but she sat in one corner of the couch reading a book and he sat in a chair with earphones blasting percussive music I could hear from more than 10 feet away. Why bother spending $300 a night to tune out the place you’re paying a fortune to be in doing what you do at home?

3. Ask yourself: What drives you? And spend some time with that question before you answer it. Think about what motivates you to buy, what you buy and when you buy.

4. Spend time doing things that are diametrically opposite to what is promoted in the media, such as being still, being with your family without electronic accessories, pray, walk, think, read. Live slowly, breath deeply, linger.

5. Be present. Don’t pursue anything. Especially happiness. It’s a waste of time and will only serve to make you frustrated. The only place you can really have what you long for is where you are right now with exactly what you’ve got.

6. Find someone to really talk to—a religious leader, a friend, a therapist, a doctor—anyone who knows how to actively listen without judging and who can be a true set of eyes with a perspective on things that get you out of the delusion maelstrom we call daily life. Make sure you don’t just find someone who’s going to agree with you. Get the reality check you need.

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The other night I watched an episode of The Mentalist in which practitioners of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming, an offshoot of Ericksonian Hypnosis ) were suspects in a murder.

Besides the triteness of the script, my objection to the episode was not the notion that a therapist might be charged or guilty or capable of murder. Such things have happened. People who present themselves as healers are not beyond suspicion. Nor should they be. What particularly galled me was the notion that anyone could possibly be capable of putting a perfect stranger into a full-Monty trance with just a touch on the shoulder. As if that weren’t enough, the real killer/hypnotherapist managed to induce a complete amnesia and generate an utter complicity in a police officer so that he would passively do her bidding.

It is unfortunately the stuff of snake oil salesmen and charlatans and it makes the work of genuine practitioners doubly difficult—not only do we hope to be up to the task of genuine healing utilizing the tools of hypnosis, but we have to battle the false perceptions cultivated by a media scrambling to beef up their ratings.

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