There's one thing the 2000s did better than the last few decades, and that's scare the living piss out of people. From poison in the mail to perverts on the computer, we spent the entire '00s shaking in our Uggs/Crocs/Manolos over some really ridiculous things. Here's the highlights:
10. The Y2K Bug - This one ends up low on the list because it was technically a 1990's panic, but seriously? As far as the ratio of "how scared we were supposed to be" versus "how scary it ended up being" goes, this is one of the all-time greats. Every single computer in the world would stop working! Credit cards would roll over hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest! Planes would fall from the sky and all the missiles at NORAD would launch at the same time. People stockpiled MREs and cans of Vienna Sausage and Potted Meat and other gross inedible junk to prepare for a apocalypse of, uh, apocalyptic proportions. And then nothing happened, and the only one who had any real reason to be upset was Prince, because we were never going to party like it was 1999 again.
9. The Anthrax Letters - Earlier this year, former Bush administration spokesperson Dana Perino said there weren't any terrorist attacks during Bush's tenure as President. Apparently she forgot the asshole that mailed letters full of goddamned anthrax around the country, killing five people and injuring over a dozen others. Remember that? Your author worked at a TV station during the time, and they seriously almost called the bomb squad in because someone sent me a box of homemade cookies. Oh no! Mysterious greasy spots on the box! Better blow it up and make sure it isn't poison! The best part? They never even caught the guy. This jerkwad stole chemical weapons from the U.S. Military, mailed them to Senators and news outlets, and then killed himself by ODing on COUGH SYRUP before he could even be picked up.
8. Flu (Bird Or Pig) - Before there was swine flu, there was the Avian Flu, or H5N1, as it's known to its friends. All of Southeast Asia was in a frenzy, facemasks became a fashion statement, and there was even a benefit concert to raise awareness of.. the flu. Flash forward to 2009 and the entire world is terrified of the H1N1 flu. Look, the flu sucks and you don't want to catch it, but wash your hands and stay away from crowds and you'll probably be okay. You know what doesn't help? TELLING PEOPLE THAT THE FLU VACCINE IS GOING TO GIVE YOU AUTISM. Seriously, you are not helping. You know what's even better? When this paranoid-ass "advice" doesn't come from a doctor or a health care provider (because that's someone we might actually listen to), but from Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey. Because if there's one thing we learned this decade, it's that celebrities are just like us… only smarter.
7. Penis-Stealing Witches - Don't get us wrong, we here at Heavy love our units. Uh, we love our own respective junk, not like, each other's. You know what we mean. Anyway, dudes in Africa are seriously concerned about their penises, to the point where three different times this decade, people have gotten murdered because they were allegedly using magic to steal johnsons. In 2001, five guys in Benin were stripped naked and set on fire after being accused of penis theft. In 2003, the sinister pecker wreckers were on the loose in the Sudan, stealing penises via handshake. In 2008, police in Congo arrested a dozen suspected penis-shrinking wizards. So far, the United States has avoided this particular panic, but do we really have much distance to travel from all those ads for pills that make your shriveled-up old man penis hard again to "a witch made my boner go away"?
6. Getting Kidnapped (If You're A White Girl) - Look, lots of women go missing, and that is a messed up and sad thing. What's more ridiculous is how the only ones who ever seem to get any media coverage are the ones who are white and pretty (and it doesn't hurt if you're blonde). The entire country turned upside down trying to figure out who killed Laci Peterson and Natalee Holloway and the goddamned Runaway Bride while dozens, if not hundreds, of women of color went underinvestigated and underreported. Everyone bent over backwards over poor Jessica Lynch, the pretty white girl who got taken captive by scary terrorists, while completely ignoring Shoshanna Johnson, the black woman from her unit who was also captured, or Lori Piestwa, the Native American woman who actually died fighting. Not to get on a soapbox here, but we're gonna start the blame with Nancy Grace, whose show pretty much seems to be the White Girls, YOU GONNA GET RAPED Hour. Maybe it's because she's a blonde white woman. Or maybe it's because she's a horrible harpy who lives only to strike fear into the hearts of (white, blonde, pretty) Middle America.
5. Video Games - Remember the 90s and how "gangsta" rap and Marilyn Manson were turning good clean suburban white kids into murderous lunatics? Or in the 80s how Judas Priest and Ozzy had backwards messages telling kids to kill themselves? And how during the Peloponnesian War, Socrates convinced all the kids to be disrespectful to their elders? Anyway, it seems like crummy parents always need someone to blame when their kid goes off and kills themselves or their friends or an entire school full of their peers. This decade, video games seem as good a culprit as any. Jack Thompson, a (now disbarred) Florida attorney, made a real name for himself claiming games like Grand Theft Auto, Counter Strike and Halo were "murder simulators" responsible for school shootings and the DC Beltway Snipers. Pretty much any time some lunatic picked up a gun and shot a bunch of people, Thompson or some other jackass would come running for the cameras, screaming about how it was the damn dirty video games that turned those kids into monsters (as opposed to a society that glorifies violence and promises easy access to firearms). Thompson is also a gigantic asshole who offered $10,000 to the gaming industry if they'd make a game where you kill game developers. So some homebrew kids did. Of course, Thompson never paid, because he's a gigantic asshole.
4. Food - From genetically modified cabbage to High Fructose Corn Syrup, we were absolutely terrified of what might be in our food. Mad cow disease crushed U.S. beef exports. The organic food movement rode this fear, turning a bunch of hippie dirt farmers into a full-fledged industry, only to immediately be co-opted by the same big food companies that got everyone freaked out in the first place. Movies and books like Super Size Me, Fast Food Nation, and Food Inc. all warned us that the disgusting fatty crap we ate every day was actually... disgusting fatty crap that was going to make us fat and disgusting if we kept eating it every day - and it was going to destroy the entire planet. Despite the fear, obesity levels actually went up, possibly because this was also the decade that saw the development of the fried Snickers bar, pancake-wrapped sausage on a stick, and Baconnaise.
3. Pedophiles! In Your Neighborhood! - We were so scared of pedophiles this decade that we basically made it impossible for them to live anywhere. Zoning laws preventing registered sex offenders from living in specific areas are so strict that in Marietta, Georgia, nine of them ended up camping in an office park, because they couldn't find anything else within an acceptable distance from a school, church, or bus stop. The same thing happened in Miami, except that time,over a hundred sex offenders wound up living under an overpass… and the City of Miami told them to! The logic, of course, is flawless – if you make it impossible for pedophiles to live anywhere in your city, they'll have to leave town, losing their jobs and forcing them to break the terms of their parole, which means they go right back to jail, where they all belong!
2. Pedophiles! On The Internet! - Seriously, the only place scarier to find a pedophile than your neighborhood… is your computer! NBC made a total killing out of this ridiculous-ass fear with To Catch A Predator, where they basically had a bunch of grown men and women pretend to be jailbait, engage in sexy chat with grown men, and then lure the dudes to a specially prepped house. While the stated goal of the program was to warn parents about the hazards of the ol' Internet and maybe put away a few pervos, the end result was sensationalistic scare tactics – Predator only came to an end after one suspect, his house surrounded by police and an NBC camera crew, killed himself. Nice going, guys!
1. The Future - So we're at the end of the decade. Ten years of paranoia and fear have passed us by, and we're looking on to a bright, shiny age of… oh god, what's that in the distance? It's the year 2012! Time to panic again! What will kill us? The end of the Mayan Long Count? A reversal of the Earth's magnetic poles? The phantom planet Nibiru? A technological singularity? I don't know, but it looks like we'll keep on panicking until then.
