The art of creating fear

We haven’t had cable TV in about a year. It just was an excessive expense with the accident, and the chaos so we cut cable and occasionally rent a redbox or find a movie or documentary at the library. Which means, we don’t watch the news. Yes, that’s right folks. WE DO NOT WATCH THE NEWS. Proudly.

Now of course, if you know me at all, you know I’m an obsessive researcher. I research everything from vaccine statistics to healthy eating, leaky gut, nutrition profiles and genetic abnormalities (not to mention I could hold my own in a conversation with top neurologists about CSF leaks!). I research water shortages in California and kickstarter campaigns with salt water filtration systems and crazy impressive solar power. So it’s not that we’re out of touch with the world. We’re out of touch with the fear mongering.

Recently, my husband had this brilliant idea to get an antenna ($8 Amazon.com) so we could pick up local programming, the occasional guilty pleasure. Greys Anatomy or some fun cooking show.  We were totally and completely unprepared for the wild advertising, consumerism and fear mongering. HOLY COW. You don’t really notice when you watch it every day, but after a break and some perspective it’s appalling!

A new drug to help with occasional depression but side effects include kidney failure and death… but look how happy we are now! New gadgets and gizmos that no one on this planet actually needs but it’s being shoved down our throat as they next thing to make life easier and it’s only $19.99. All I can see is how many will soon be in landfills once people realize it’s just one more gadget for their kitchen to find space for and use once a year.

The other day I turned on the tv to watch a documentary with the kids and in the two minutes it took me to switch over from tv to dvd, some daytime talkshow (like The View-although I’m not sure that’s what it was) was showing clips from YouTube about some baby laughing when its dad coughed. THIS IS DAYTIME TV? With all that is happening in the world, with a new 17 year old winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, with all of the amazing inventions to save the planet, with all of the beautiful wonderful things in our world – you are using TV time to show me silly clips of someone’s baby from the internet???  Even my 5 year old son looks up at the TV (as they replay the clip for the third time) “ya, ya, we got it. This is ridiculous mom”. My thoughts exactly. What a lazy, greedy, excuse to sell commercials and take up TV time.

As someone who spent a good portion of her career in corporate marketing and advertising, I have a fairly good handle on the how’s and why’s for television commercials and the subtle techniques used for a “win”.

Don’t even get me started about Ebola. Does no one else think it strange that there are no positive public service messages to strengthen your immune system? Wash your hands? Get enough sleep. Consider a daily probiotic (proven to increase strength of the immune system). Ebola doesn’t kill everyone it comes in contact with. Survivors typically had a strong immune system.  No. It’s about creating fear. How scary it all is. How many people have died. How fast it is spreading. How the CDC has everything under control. No wait – maybe they don’t. It’s no big deal – but it is deadly. It’s a roller coaster of emotions that the public is being drug through. And that is as scary as anything else.  What about some confidence, strength, education, leadership?

Down with the fear mongering.  Don’t drink the kool-aid. Fear makes people stop thinking. It makes people stop trusting their own intuition. It gets people to hand over their power to someone else as it’s just too overwhelming to decide ourselves.

Lets lift each other up. Find strength, education, confidence. Talk to those whose opinion you value, and have an educated conversation, debate is ok – you don’t have to agree – the goal is to learn. And keep learning.  Trust yourself.

Raise your vibration. How about believing in miracles? Faith doesn’t cost a thing.

Create your sunshine life. Ditch the fear. Be your radiant self instead. Learn something new that is beautiful about our world. And for heavens sake, turn off that fear machine.

xoxo ~ Clover Sunshine