It's just not as scary these days

The Misanthrope by ETHAN CHATAGNIER / The Collegian

What ever happened to our good friend Anthrax? Remember it, the white powder that made senators tremble just a couple years ago?

Well, duct tape sales have plummeted and it seems our fear of Anthrax has disappeared almost as quickly as the 1990s metal band of the same name (who, you ask? My point exactly).

I’ve come to daydreaming a name for the next big scare: Killpitor, Terrorzac, Deathamusil. As long as it sounds evil, no one needs to know anything about it to feel the fear.

And right now, I’m having trouble feeling the fear. WMD sounds more like a committee acronym than a death sentence. It’s about as scary, really, as a romantic comedy.

The terror alert system, that veritable crayon box of certain death, also fails to scare me. Though it may work on Midwesterners, if I have to check it in morning, that sort of ruins the suspense.

In the good old days, we knew what to avoid because it had an “X” in its name. Just the mention could make us quake, and quake twofold when the media tacked “weapons-grade” to it.

Though a culture of fear pervades middle America, the Bush administration may be slipping in keeping a good turnover of terminology. An orange terror alert isn’t going to get anyone excited anymore.

The least they could do is advance the scale, issue a press release for an aquamarine alert, in response to most terrifying terrorism the world might possibly, potentially ever see.

Or maybe I should be grateful that I have to go to the movies for a good scare these days.

Maybe we’re all tired of having fear pushed upon us. Just when I thought you could scare the average American with weapons-grade aspirin, people are noticing that there’s no need to fear weapons of mass destruction that don’t exist, or an alert system that does nothing but cry wolf.