The other day I was watching yet another politician playing the fear con and it occurred to me that the word "fear" doesn't get used all that much in spite of the fact that we've been fed an almost steady diet of ersatz fear-inducing crap for the last fifteen years.
Fear is actually a healthy emotion... A couple of weeks back when Invest 90L popped up out of nowhere it gave me a serious jolt of stomach churning, iced bowels, and pissing your pants fear. Yeah, way past Spidey sense because I knew that 90L was a serious threat. The next forecast and the more reliable computer models show it would track right over us which increased the fear level a notch and we got into big-storm-come-soon mode.
Trust me, fear is a pretty awesome motivator to get your shit together which is hardly surprising as that's what it's for.
Luckily (for us) the storm edged a bit north (but still within the forecast cone) and Gonzalo never even touched us. Of course, just a hundred miles away St Martin got nailed and, judging from the number of ill prepared boats wrecked, too few people were afraid enough to get sorted out and that might have let them fare better.
"Fear" is an emotion that is there for a reason but, sadly, it has been corrupted to the point that a lot of folks now concentrate on nonexistent threats and ignore the sort of thing that's coming right at you with your name written all over it.
Then again, with so many pseudo reasons for fear like those pesky Islamic State Ebola carriers sneaking over the Texas border to steal your trick and treat candy and other such drivel, it's hard to tell the difference. Maybe it's needful to reacquaint yourself with what threats are real, which ones are not, and then learn to embrace and listen to the fear when it speaks rather than be controlled by it.
Listening to Jesse Winchester
So it goes...
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