``Every period has its timidities.  Do I dare read Ovid?
 Do I dare disbelieve in immortality?  The threat of nuclear
 warfare may indeed spread anxiety; yet people have always
 dreaded an eschaton, a violent end to time.  Still, after
 all the qualifications, there does seem to be an alarming
 cultivation of anxiety in our day.  It seems part and
 parcel of this new open-ended proliferation of anxiety
 that we cannot pin down the reasons, which themselves
 proliferate like the spawning images in a state of panic.
 We might be inclined to connect our modern anxiety with
 the bustling chaos of urban life, as opposed to farming
 communities, where anxiety is annual, expected, ritualized.
 We might argue that a medieval worldview, with its clear
 distinctions, its sure sense of boundaries, managed anxiety
 better than the relativisms of the early modern and modern
 periods, with their two-edged gift of infinite human
 possibilities.  With many qualifications, we must make
 such distinctions stick.  But whatever the causes, anxiety is
 on us like a plague these days.  Not long ago thrillers and
 murder mysteries were mostly about criminals with distinct
 motives.  Now they feature the serial killer.  Unlike the murderer
 who killed, fulfilled his purpose, and hoped to remain innocuous,
 the inexorable serial killer with his open-ended string of crimes
 hopes to become famous as a source of anxiety.  News broadcasts,
 themselves great organizers of anxiety, regularly contain health
 segments in which the public is invited to become anxious about
 what it eats, what it buys, how it seeks pleasure.  One set of
 experts steps forth to inculcate anxiety, another to teach us
 how to live with it.  What do those in the know actually
 know?  They always claim to know where our true concerns should lie...

 ``...This new space, ``social anxiety,'' seems to be an extensive
 one.  There's no housing shortage when it comes to social anxiety.
 Today we have environmental anxiety (the main subsets being clean
 air, clean water, clean sunlight); food anxiety; trash anxiety;
 hatred anxiety; dirt anxiety; dating anxiety; consumer anxiety;
 parenting anxiety (some of the subsets being toy, spanking, lessons,
 college, and money anxiety); academic anxiety; television anxiety;
 political anxiety (subsets too numerous to mention); fashion
 anxiety; hair anxiety; wealth anxiety; job anxiety; speech anxiety;
 endangered species anxiety; crime anxiety; medical anxiety;
 alcohol anxiety; smoking anxiety; and so on through every
 compartment of modern existence...''

 ==
 Wm. Kerrigan, ``Death and Anxiety,'' _Raritan_ XVI:3 Winter 1997 p.74