Panic

I have had a challenging Spring.

Two weeks after placing my house on the market, the rains came. Then the flooding came. My city was under water in some places, but I just had a skim coat of water in one part of my basement. Nothing serious really. But, the generalized panic, an all-too-common response in the media these days, crashed the local housing market and caused me to take my house off the market long enough to dry out and get the floor of my basement repainted. Now it's back to being dry as a bone.

The week after I placed my house back on the market, the state of Massachusetts began work on the bridge nearby, which connects my neighborhood with Boston. Suddenly, the pleasant, tree-lined boulevard where I live became a clogged commuter expressway, due to closed lanes and workmen in the road. Again, the media and the state whipped the whole thing into The End of Days. Now, after some trial and error by traffic planners, the traffic is moving along at a slightly slower pace, but the initial panic seems unwarranted.

Last weekend, the water system broke for 30 cities and towns around Boston. Other than boiling my water and adding some lemon juice, there was relatively little inconvenience. But the media again were talking to us like Ebola virus would be crawling out of our pipes and infecting us in our sleep. The supermarkets made a fortune on bottled water. The government did not supply imported water in tanker trucks as they could have. Nobody, so far, has died from the water. Now the taps are back to normal.

On a global scale, Icelandic volcano, Haitian earthquake, Chilean earthquake, Chinese earthquake are focused upon by media with enthusiastic shock and awe on a daily basis. Our eyes and ears are supplied with unrelenting fearsome stimuli, thanks to the insatiable appetite for news and its use as a forum for selling diapers, dog food and shampoo.

I am still sitting here in my house with its For Sale sign out front. The buyers are flowing through. Someone will come in and say, "I like this place. I could live here." I did. And, all around us, the world's normal events will continue and Wall Street will be trying to profit from them, whether we are paying attention or not.

I seem jaded to some, but the truth is that I have had to deal with my share of personal panic. It comes from living an eventful life. I have learned that taking deep breaths and just doing what makes sense, slowly and methodically, eventually gets me through. Like a Zen monk, raking gravel, I make my daily lists and check them off.

I recommend this approach to editors of media newsrooms. To those who sell shampoo and dog food by funding exploitative media, I have nothing to recommend at all.