fear

Many people believe Churchill said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, but it was his wartime contemporary Franklin D Roosevelt. Despite the bombs, people take heed. These days no one is listening and advertisers and so-called current affairs television lead a faux assault devoted to convincing us to quiver in our silk slippers.

The advertising industry drives a nationwide campaign, probably world-wide, to generate profound feelings of insecurity and inadequacy in us, especially in parents. If a parent, read mother, doesn’t wipe the benches with a particular brand of sanitary cloth, she’s neglecting her children’s welfare.

A work colleague returns to her desk from the ‘bathroom’ aghast at what she sees there—a woman who washes her hands inadequately after using the toilet: she uses water but no soap! The fear of germs, spermatophobia, is rife.

I’m a victim of the germ-fear. On entering a public toilet, I wash my hands before putting them anywhere near my cock. I don’t want the myriad microbes from the doorhandle on my nice clean knob. When the last drop is finally wrung out I make a grand exit without further ablution.

Meanwhile current affairs television peddles urban mythology, the disease or paedophile story ‘every parent should see’. Manufactured sensationalism that sells the program, sells advertising, sells fear. Dumb-arses buy it. Beware the spider invading suburban houses whose venom causes necrotic limbs to drop off like lizards’ tails.

Parents fall for the current affairs fiction that our streets have never been meaner, despite copious research proving the opposite. They deposit their precious offspring at school gates from multi-air-bagged behemoths rather than allow children to walk, discover their neighbourhood, ride a bicycle down quiet side streets.

The poor timorous creatures balloon while billboards advertise snacks as the food you eat while waiting to eat, premised on the fear of feeling even the slightest pang of hunger. Modern kids don’t know hunger, nor satiety.

The nanny state is not governments making laws protecting us from ourselves, though things are dire in that regard. It’s about us saving ourselves from our own irrational and undeserving fears.

Fortunately the germs I meet strengthen my immunity to every goddam lunatic notion floating by out there in the public arena. Bring on some filth.

Rock on.