Panic culture

You're all going to have to forgive me because I'm feeling a bit philosophical today.

(please forgive me, I'll change 'revelry' to 'Ravelry' later. Still using a very uncooperative iPad which thinks it knows what I want to say. Mostly it just points at the dictionary and picks the most bizarre fit it can find.)

I kind of feel as though we're living in a 'Panic Culture', maybe we've let our fascination with horror films permeate everything else in our lives, but we seem to love to panic, and we let others, like the press, play on this.

For example, Grandma S sent me an article on the spread of Giant Hogsweed, a nasty invasive plant that makes poison ivy look like a nice soak in a hot tub. It wasn't a bad article overall, the problem was that they were deliberately... I can't think of the word I'm looking for. They show boated. They showed a blurry photo of the flower of the plant which without context looks almost exactly like a nice harmless Queen Annes Lace, and only at the very bottom of the article did they cough up their sleeve and admit that these deceptive and lacy bloom spreads are the size of umbrellas. They also went out of their way not to mention the actual habitat that this invader prefers, the scale of the plant overall, or other details like the rhubarb red stalks, or even show the distinctive and huge leaves, all of which in combination make this plant resemble Queen Annes Lace only as closely as two random people with the same hair color might look alike.

While it's a horrible plant and should be handled by people who know what they're doing, a little extra information would gave pointed out just how EASY this nasty customer would be to see coming. It's almost less of a plant and more of a kaiju.

We see similar articles almost daily, if not hourly, where pertiant information that would change the entire context of a discussion is entirely ignored just to add to the sensationalism of the tale, and I think at this point the press isn't alone in this.

I had to cringe reading some discussions on revelry, since there was a young mother concerned that her almost three year old wasn't a big talker. Instead of doing legwork MANY of the suggestions that popped up heavily implied at being a delayed talker CLEARLY implied that the child MUST be autistic. This just not only isn't a given it's a horrible thing to imply, without verification, to a worried parent. It's almost tantamount to saying 'that sneeze is an major indicator for incurable pneumonia'.

As parents don't we have enough to worry about without modern updates to Old Wives Tales?