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judith timson

It's barely the beginning of 2010 and already there are horrible new things to be afraid of. An approaching dementia epidemic! Skyrocketing interest rates! Exploding underwear! Airport screeners seeing you naked!

I had hoped we would make this decade at least slightly different from the last. As CBC Radio's Michael Enright recently pointed out on his show The Sunday Edition, the previous decade began with one "spasm of groundless fear and baseless hysteria" - Y2K - and ended with another - swine flu. In between, of course, there were some very real terrors: Sept. 11 and the economic meltdown.

But unless we take immediate action, this decade will be swamped by the Fear Factor as well.

Many of us contribute to it. Politicians strive to make you afraid so you'll vote for them. (While crime prevention legislation, for example, may be of value, insinuating that the crime rate is uniformly rising is often a lie.)

And the media - we are the ultimate sky-is-falling brigade. It's our job to connect the dots and highlight the dangers, but the ubiquitous "breaking news" from airplanes around the world if one non-terrorist passenger gets slightly unruly is designed to do nothing but get our pulses racing and keep us hooked.

Clearly, fear can be a drug. It's addictive to be on terror alert or economic lockdown. It sharpens the senses, and our resulting hyper-vigilance gives us a sense of busyness and purpose, which is rather pathetic.

The world's genuine dangers are not going to disappear so easily. So we are going to have to find better ways to handle our fear - globally and personally.

Personally, it could be taking a mindfulness approach: focusing on the present and not the terrifying what ifs of the future.

Or we could try adopting a European-style shrug of the shoulders when faced with bad news. The French, for example, seem to greet every fresh désastre with a mordant "but, of course" - as if to say, what else did you expect?

I've been impressed by beleaguered travellers being interviewed in airports about the often absurd new preflight security measures in the wake of the attempted Christmas Day airplane bombing.

From an older woman laughing and saying, "Who cares if those scanners see me naked?" to a man philosophically weighing the benefits of increased safety over longer wait times and choosing safety, most people seem both sanguine and balanced in their reaction.

What they are really saying is they'd rather have the inconvenience than the fear, let alone the actual danger. (Of course, there are now two fresh fears: the shocking incompetence of intelligence experts and the possibility of missing one's plane altogether. It's a never-ending loop.)

You may ask friends and family about what truly scares them and discover few of your fears are unique. One of my friends, who is challenged daily by an unpredictable illness, took the time to list not only what she was currently afraid of but what no longer roused her fear-o-meter. Out: nuclear holocaust. In: running out of time, being trapped by a debilitating disease, "an endless end." And she added that classic fear of most parents: that our children won't have happy, healthy lives and enjoy the same benefits we have.

Another fear fighter: laughter. Comedian Jon Stewart started his first Daily Show of the new year with a segment called Terror 2.0, complete with "doomsday underpants." I felt much better after watching it, as I did reading Andy Borowitz's blog posting suggesting that the new full body scans would also double as medical checkups.

To quell fear globally, we have to elect good leaders who know what to say about a crisis as well as what to do. Say what you will about U.S. President Barack Obama's mixed results in his first year in office, there is still something to admire in his calm approach to dangerous situations and his refusal to employ semantics to up the ante. He fully acknowledged both the unacceptable failures of the system in the airline incident and the frustration of travellers in the wake of more stringent security, but somehow the axis of evil has been downgraded to an axis of upheaval, which seems a more manageable threat. Though it drives his fear-addicted opponents - pining for that old shock-and-awe lingo - crazy.

I'm not going to insult you by exhorting you, as so many self-help books about fear do, to "live boldly" or "take a risk," if what you're feeling is genuine fear. But it's good to remember that unless you're holed up in your house, wrapped in an angora blanket and watching Friends reruns, just being in the outside world is taking a risk.

Instead, I'll leave you with this: Breathe deeply, weigh what all doomsdayers are selling before you buy and consider that even if you're a frequent flier, every statistic shows you are likely to survive.

In which case, you better figure out what to do about those skyrocketing interest rates. Not to mention dementia.

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