Americans will never get over their fear until they quit trying to find some magic elixir to cure all their problems. Taking responsibility for your own well being would be a rational start. There is no pill for every ill but the search for one has certainly made a whole lot of drug companies and their stockholders very rich. If we are honest with ourselves we know that many of our afflictions are because of our lifestyle and the choices we make. There is unfortunately no pill that provides common sense.

Having had extensive exposure from within the medical community by profession (as well as a son who is), and the poor luck of having several real chronic illnesses, my feeling from the inside looking out is that of many other Americans being brainwashed by pharmaceutical giants to either buy medicine or tell their doctors to prescribe it to them. I watched a football game two days ago and there were twelve commercials for pharmaceuticals during the game-everything from erectile dysfunction pills (the big buck meds now, though they are dangerous for many men with cardiovascular disease), antihistamines, pills for benign prostatic hypertrophy, sleeping pills, pills for arthritis, and several adds for drugs to treat hyperlipedemia (high cholesterol and related problems).
Though I myself am nearly 60 and have had lymphoma cancer, a spinal tumor that prevents me from walking unassisted, cardiac arrythmias requiring a pacemaker, blood clots in my lungs on three occasions requiring lifetime anticoagulation medications, two knee replacements and elbow and shoulder surgeries for inflammatory joint disease, I take only one medication remotely related to the drugs advertised during the game, a statin drug for elevated cholesterol. Of the remainder of the commercials that weren’t for global warming SUVs and pickup trucks, nearly all were for the other substance that is one of the two that are causing the most medical problems in America for the past 30 years.
Americans and human beings in general take very poor care of themselves and show a propensity to ingest and inject poisons into their bodies. In America the cost of alcoholism and methamphetamine addiction is incomprehensible. The mental health system is overrun with ‘DDs’, dual diagnosis patients who have most often alcoholism (and in the last 15 years more and more methamphetamine use, often both) and a secondary mental health problem that is usually a result of chronic brain damage from the poisoning. This usally is something like a form a mental retardation called organic brain syndrome, or can be hallucinations or seizures, or blackout spells. There really are ‘lost weekends’, but most are spent on 48 hour holds in overloaded county mental health facilities. An occasional glass of wine is certainly not harmful, but there are at least 15 to 18 million Americans who are addicted to alcohol sufficiently that they drink daily, and often to excess. Methamphetamine is deadlier than alcohol and despite being illegal (unlike the freely advertised booze), it causes a substance-induced psychosis in a relatively short time if used for an extended period without stopping, and fries the user’s brain in a much shorter time if used regularly. Now at least 5 million strong, tweakers are able to stay perpetually stoned on a relatively cheap habit, that rots out their teeth, turns their brain to swiss cheese, and in a few short years they can pass for a born schizophrenic, but did it to themselves.
What is being done to stop this? Well, the ‘War on Drugs’ focuses as much on such substances as marijuana as it does on meth, despite this substance having only mild long term effects and actually having some medicinal applications for treatment of nausea and chemotherapy side effects. The other problem is that the ‘War on Drugs’ has been as big a travesty as the War in Iraq. Spending nearly $20 billion a year, the ‘War’ has made drugs more plentiful and cheaper than ever and half the arrests are cannabis-related.
America isn’t a nation of hypochondriacs. It is a nation run by fascist fools, financed by Pharmaceutical companies, and populated by tweakers and alcoholics.

Why are so many people afraid of so many things? Is it possible that the religion that they so ardently follow is not providing the sense of security that each religion claims?

Apparently their fear of premature death is greater than their faith. If they truly believe, then they should rely on G-d and JC to answer their prayers. Or is it possible that they have discovered that prayers have never restored a severed limb? If they really want proof, just visit any Military Hospital caring for the amputees of the Iraq war.

A true Atheist is not encumberred with fear; accepting the fact that we are just another living thing on this planet. We are destined to die like all other life. Afterlife is just another scheme to make the poor and downtrodden accept their present status in life, with the promise of a heavently afterlife.

WriterOnTheStorm wrote Some genious should invent a psychological GPS system. One that maps out these insecurities, and warns us when we approach oncoming exploitability thresholds. Now that would be truly useful.

This brings to mind Hari Seldon’s psychohistorians from Asimov’s Foundation stories.

So why do we increasingly find ourselves hunkered behind walls, popping pills by the handful to stave off diseases we might never contract and eyeing the rest of the world with a kind of us-or-them suspicion that borders on the pathological?

I think the reverse of the above is probably the case for many of the pills you take. Eyeing the rest of the world with a kind of us-or-them suspicion that borders on the pathological cannot be good for the psyche. There are probably all sorts of physical ailments also stemming from this.

I do believe this fear thing has been over blown. The majority of everyday people I encounter do not live in fear of much of the above reasons mentioned in the article. The one fear not mentioned to all too many, is the fear of not being able to pay the bills each month as job loss, downsizing, reduced wages/benefits has been a constant worry for those in my state since the 1970’s with Reagan’s trickle down economics.

I have relatives, retired professionals who travel the country extensively and they have not encountered this “fear” as much as the media outlets profess to. I asked them directly to see their take on it. Their answer, most people live and work as before and don’t let this so called fear element rule their daily lives.

The greatest fear, which most of us cannot control is what this delusional administration will do to America(s) and the rest of the real world in their paranoid world view of their own drug/alcohol induced reality. It seems that all the proof to counter these false claims of impending doom from this administration is never good enough. They are the ones with the REAL fear problems and it is obvious they are unable to handle reality so they convert to lies to feed the fear and delusion that they need to use to try and control those who are weak enough to fall for it.

Strange, Bushco will believe a fairytale book written by anonymous authors, changed countless times through the centuries as truth and real truth, proven facts backed up by evidence is dismissed as untrue. This is total proof they king is insane.

“The American Anthropological Association held its annual meeting…... “The Insecure American” turned out to be a revelation—by turns alarming, depressing and laugh-out-loud amusing—as scholar after scholar presented research showing just how unnerved this society is….”

There is a confluence of at least three major sets of experiences in the American psyche which, in turn, has produced a layered effect of anxiety, refusal and denial. The “new world order” has turned out to be the negative effects of the USA’s own lust for power and the counter-effects of economic forces on the world stage.

But first, historically, there is the original invasion and landgrab of settler society with its mindset of “white is right” and its resultant justification of its depredations both on the landscape and the indigenous peoples and the enslaved Africans it brought with it.

Secondly, and still continuing, there is the historical flow of migrations of European and other peoples with their anxieties of fitting in with the established order of things. That was made more acute for many because of the restricted circumstances from which they came and the pseudo-freedom of the rigidly WASP semi-police-state they found themselves in.

Third, there was the American civil war and the atrocities which Americans visited upon themselves and each other and which still exists in the minds and hearts of most Americans. It is a subtly magnetizing force which has compelled the USA to meddle in other peoples’ conflicts and especially where there is, or there is potential for, a civil war (Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq).

Since 1945, with the realization of the US global hegemonic empire by virtue of being the last major power left standing after WW2 and the fact that it had developed super-weapons (WMD’s) AND used them, the USA has gone on to create its own pernicious evil with the military-industrial complex rather than the people being triumphant.

Thus the global empire that was spawned with the Spanish-American war, “a wingspan of 10,000 miles” from Cuba to the Philippines, matured and found reason after reason to invade and molest smaller countries around the globe for its own perceived benefit. But, since the 1970’s-80’s, its manufacturing base started to crumble and the reality of the level playing field and globalization has begun a two-way effect.

Now, the psychic results of “living the lie” of both white settler society and the richest nation on Earth are coming home to haunt every American. The wealthy can afford to complain but the majority are becoming poorer as well as more and more disturbed. Only realization of the truth of their essentially contrived mental complexes can save them.

That Americans are insecure is hardly a revelation. What is newer, and of immediate concern, is the ingenious and increasingly sinister ways that government and markets have found to exploit these insecurities.

These fears are big business. Careers are made by those who can tap into them. Wars are justified. Religious cults founded. Soaps sold.

Some genious should invent a psychological GPS system. One that maps out these insecurities, and warns us when we approach oncoming exploitability thresholds. Now that would be truly useful.

In America, fear, greed, corruption, and deceit are quite profitable and are now the foundation of our political and societal mores.

Thank you very much for what I’ve been looking for for a long time…scientific evidence that everybody should just chill out.