The U.S. of Anxiety
Each Day Brings Breathless News Of Another Threat

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 19, 2008

You stare at your sunglasses. They stare back. You ask, "Et tu?" Are they also toxic? And what other toxins have they been hiding behind those rose-colored shades through which you've looked at the world all these years and thought it good?

The cellphone sits on your desk and you wonder if it is contaminated, too. The CD you love, playing it all these years until you squeezed all the music out of it -- has it really been killing you?

You wonder whether it, too, contains the resins that the National Toxicology Program indicated this week can mimic estrogen in the body and may cause cancer and other disorders. While you read this, look on the bottom of your water bottle. If there is a simple 7, stamped like a demon sign in the recycling-logo triangle, it also may contain the dreaded bisphenol A, a chemical used in the production of polycarbonate plastics.

"Are people exposed to bisphenol A?" the report asks. "Yes. The primary source of exposure to bisphenol A for most people is through the diet. . . . Bisphenol A can migrate into food from food and beverage containers with internal epoxy resin coatings and from consumer products such as polycarbonate tableware, food containers, water bottles and baby bottles."

You put your water bottle down. Fear creeps in. You rub your hands on your skirt for good measure. What will you drink? You have long feared the water fountain after there were reports of lead. But it's not just the water. Plastic forks potentially contain the evil resin, too. And canned food, and baby bottles. Potential hazards lurk.

With this report, the fireflies of fear have risen again. Fears are caressed, and pampered and promulgated. Rampant and steady, fed through a constant drip of reports, with warnings coming long after you have spent years walking with a cellphone virtually glued to your head and drinking from plastic bottles and bearing those potentially lethal dental sealants in your mouth.

Fear is abstract and concrete. Edible and liquid. You may have imbibed it this morning as you listened to the news about the long list of other things you should be afraid of: The economy, climate change, rising utility prices, foreclosures, school massacres, the absence of bees.

But fear is a curious thing. It makes a person run from one thing, but she may be running into the arms of something more frightful. They say fear is the emotion that brings things to pass. One day you wake up and realize the thing you feared is not the monster that has come to sleep in your bed. But something else, something you never thought about, would creep in the open window. It's all a matter of perspective.

Elly Porter is a good mother. An arts and dance teacher who lives in Takoma Park, she ran for years from the fear of bad food. She did everything to avoid it. "When I had my first child," Porter says, "I was the healthiest mom. I nursed her. I fed her all organic food. . . . She got cancer anyway." Her daughter, now 18, has recovered.

That put the brakes on her worries about food. After that, Porter learned to balance her fears with common sense. She doesn't microwave food in plastic. It's an intuitive thing that seems to make sense. "I don't know about the latest fear," she says. "Bottled water?"

She is standing in an aisle in a mega-bookstore. The sun presses through large windows. She smiles. "Fear is a curious thing," she says. "But I think I'm more fearful of my daughter driving."

* * *

We don't mean to frighten you, only to explore fear, go on the journey into phobia, examine it and get out safely on the other side. Understand why our anxiety has increased. Why people are so jittery.

The reports slip out from government watchdog agencies announcing carcinogens in bread, grilled meat and mothballs. We hear about them on the news, read of them in the papers. Then the reports disappear, though they remain in the dark recesses of the mind, issuing vague warnings as you toss mothballs into the closet, whispering threats as you grill in the summer. We are either afraid of the truth or we don't believe those who issue these reports.

"One thing that happens is, we live in this environment . . . the culture of fear, where there are lots of fears and scares directed at us all the time," says Barry Glassner, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California and author of "The Culture of Fear" and "The Gospel of Food."

In this kind of environment, people tend to look for fear everywhere and thereby produce more things to be fearful of, he says. "For example, it was from scares about tap water that the multibillion-dollar bottled-water industry emerged. So now we have ourselves in a situation where we are creating all kinds of new environmental hazards."

The fear of bacteria that has produced a billion-dollar industry of antibacterial products has had an unintended consequence: antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the new fear that has fostered.

The list of things we fear has grown long and rapidly: bioengineered corn, spinach, identity theft, the poor, the rich, racism, sexism, the ozone hole, drug companies, cellular phones, vaccines, water, video games and predators who could kidnap our children. (Many have fears about the Iraq war, too; others are just angry.)

"The irony is that the most common dangers, the ones that we really should be focused on, become a blur in all the exaggerated fears," Glassner said.

For instance: "You want to make your house safe," he says. So rather than buying things to protect you from unlikely dangers, people should instead take simple measures to keep themselves safe.

"You could make sure the carpets are secure; the bathroom is safe from falls; you have safety precautions around the backyard pool; that children are wearing helmets when they ride their bikes; that everyone in the car is wearing a seat belt. Those are the kinds of things we should be concerned about."

* * *

Fear spreads, metastasizes. It is fed, nurtured, by so much of what we consume -- what is offered -- by the storm of information that surrounds us. From the government. From the news media. From anybody and everybody on the Internet.

"Free-floating anxiety is out there; 9/11 shook everybody to the bones. People felt for a long time [that] nobody will touch us. But 9/11 said, 'Yes they can,' " says Paula Danzinger, associate professor of counselor education at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J. "Once people start getting that anxious and having those kinds of fears, it spreads to everything. I don't think it can be isolated."

The reports seem to deluge us: poison in toys, evil chemicals in plastic. And you learn that cold medicine is bad for your children -- 10 years after you've given it to them.

What is safe? Where is safe?

"We all know children's toys are poisoned from China. We know there is poison in plastic bottles. Partly because all the news channels have to make news," so they tell us things over and over, says Danzinger. "All the news channels, cable, the Internet. Oh, my God -- we can't fly because the planes will fall out of the sky. And bridges will fall down. Didn't a bridge just fall down? I'm not sure I want to go through that tunnel because it is under the Hudson River, and will that hold?"

Her advice: "Turn off the TV. Don't watch the news so much -- not because I'm talking to a newspaper. Newspapers are easier on you than TV. You don't have to read the article." More advice: breathe. Breathe deeply. Don't forget to breathe.

William Morrison, 58, is on his way to jog near Sligo Creek Park, holding his potentially harmful water bottle.

"I've had to deal with fear of flying and fear of public speaking," he says, having stopped to discuss the topic at hand. "Over the years, I've learned you can train yourself to overcome your fears. I just took a couple of plane rides to Europe. . . . I agree with people who say courage is not absence of fear but being able to act despite fear in any situation."

Morrison said he was most fearful when the region was stalked by snipers. "What I ended up doing is dressing in a black track suit and going out and running every night to work off the fear." He overcame it.

He grips his water bottle.

"I have a bottle of water. I have no fear of that," he says. "A lot of these fears are long-acting. I'll be dead by the time toxins have any effect on my body -- if they are there."

He takes a sip.