Fearing fear

This past summer, I wrote of the impending dire circumstances facing our nation as the prospect of $8 a gallon gasoline loomed on the horizon.

I made that assessment after reading "the nation's leading expert" on gasoline pricing. This "expert" was and remains a leading forecaster within the petroleum industry and clearly knows the ins and outs of the petro pipeline. He predicted with great certainty and in stark detail exactly what was ahead for this nation.

Gasoline prices at the time were topping $4 per gallon. Nothing short of a fundamental change in our daily lives was in the near future, he said, as gasoline soared toward his predicted $8 per gallon.

Well, time and circumstances have proven the expert wrong. And I feel foolish now for swallowing his clearly overhyped prediction. Like so many others, I was caught up in the hysteria of the moment. It seemed level-headed and logical to me that indeed gasoline could reach that price level.

At that point, nothing had stopped it from topping $3 then $3.50 and then $4 per gallon. And remember, he was the "expert," and we are to believe those lofty individuals who read the tea leaves and peer into the future.

Hysteria is a dangerous path. It creates a stampede mentality, and we beasts respond accordingly. Or at least I certainly did.

When the stock market began to nosedive in record fashion, there was an interesting panel of -- you guessed it -- "experts" who tried to pinpoint when the widely watched financial indicator would hit zero.

And once again, if you followed logic and had followed the market free fall thousands of points, you might also wonder when Wall Street would hit financial zero.

Needless to say, at least at this point, the market will never hit rock bottom as some of those hysterical thinkers had predicted. Did I mention that hysteria was a dangerous path?

Along comes the failing banks and Wall Street tycoons who tell us that without a government bailout, no one anywhere will ever be able to acquire a loan and that millions upon millions will fall homeless in the near future. So we swallowed the hysteria and we forked over taxpayer money that we honestly don't have.

Today, it's the auto industry. Absent billions more dollars, these "experts" warn of 30 percent unemployment as millions of autoworkers are tossed into the streets. Every community large and small will experience massive job loss because of the failure of the Big Three.

These experts tell Congress that without your tax dollars, the Depression era will look like the good old days. They breed hysteria to get their way, and once again it appears to work.

All of this makes me recall the story of the little boy who cried wolf. It also reminds me of the dire predictions following Katrina that the next year would bring the worst hurricane season in history -- which also failed to materialize.

In short, dire predictions are rarely as dire as predicted. As Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Michael Jensen is a Southeast Missourian columnist and publisher of the Standard Democrat in Sikeston, Mo.