Fear Factory

The Next National Calamity: An Attack, And It Comes Right After the Word 'Panic'

The battle against terror has even come to little Ridgely, a quiet gameboard of a town (pop. 1,400) on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It has street names like Park, Railroad, Sunrise and Sunset. It is pretty far from everywhere.

City police recently installed three sleek white surveillance cameras, paid for by a homeland security grant. Two, mounted on the front of the three-story Victorian mansion that is the town hall, keep a cross-eyed vigil up and down Central Avenue. The third peers down over the door of the police station, which is on the back side of town hall.

"You can't ever tell," says Police Chief Merlin Evans, 59. Terrorists just might pass through Ridgely on their way to a bigger target, he says.

Terrorism. Weapons of mass destruction. Bird flu. Hurricanes. Sex offenders. New and terrible forms of cancer. Sexually transmitted diseases. Alzheimer's. Crystal meth labs. Lawsuits. Prison breaks! Female suicide bombers! Wildfires! Identity theft! Terrifying toys! Falling branches! Insurance fraud! Killer cold weather! Searing heat! Flash floods . . . exploding gas tanks . . . erupting volcanoes . . . capsizing boats . . . devastating typhoons . . . wild emergency plane landings . . . train wrecks-famines-pestilence-ice storms-global warming! Deadly parade balloons!

This is a land in lockdown. Seventy years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the country: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Today, we are told to fear everything but fear itself, which we embrace with widespread arms, outstretched hands and an open wallet. We treat fear like Caesar victorious. We allow fear into our homes, our heads, our hearts. We build whole industries around it.

Let's admit it: We are living in Fraidy Cat Nation.

If you are a girl, you'll be abducted! If you are a boy, you'll be molested! If you are a tourist, you'll be robbed!

This never-ending barrage of warnings and bad news eventually becomes an indistinguishable, indecipherable din, says Marc Siegel, a New York doctor and author of "False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear." He believes we need to redirect the nation's, and our own, response to danger warnings. "I'm not against preparation," he says, "I'm against alarmism."

The core problem lies in the amygdala -- the little bobsled-shaped part of the brain that processes fear. The amygdala is at the center of the brain's emotional network. Primal feelings -- and stress -- come from here. But the crucial area can only handle one emotion at a time. "The same amygdala that processes fear," Siegel explains, "also processes positive emotions. So if you are busy fueling your amygdala with fear, then courage, passion, laughter can't get in."

In other words, if the brain is always on a yellow (elevated alert) threat level, it is not able to rest or relax or even prepare properly for the next real onslaught.

So it is with our national amygdala -- Washington.

Here in the fear center of America's brain, the government, the corporate lobbyists and the media converge. (Prime example: In February, MarketWatch reported that Tom Ridge, the former head of Homeland Security who urged us all to buy lots of duct tape, was joining the board of directors of Home Depot, megasellers of duct tape.)