Do You Want to Know What Frightens Me?

There are a lot of frightening things in this world.

My friend Julia is frightened of multi-national corporations, how they seem to be taking over every aspect of our lives, and how the government seems unable or unwilling to control them.

My cousin Elizabeth is frightened of global warming, the loss of our ozone layer, and the overall destruction of our environment.

Her 8-year-old son Eric is frightened of another terrorist attack on our country.

Now, these are just a few examples of some people I know personally. There are so many other people and so many other things to be frightened of.

Do you want to know what frightens me? I’ll tell you.

Wolves.

You ask me, “How can you be frightened of wolves when you don’t even live in an area with a large wolf population?”

Well, it’s easy: wolves are scary.

Wolves are wild animals with sharp teeth. They run very fast. They eat meat. I know they won’t attack humans unless provoked, but that doesn’t lessen my fear of them.

Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that you’re attacked by a wolf. Even if you survive the vicious assault from a predator that travels in packs that cumulatively would outweigh most people—their dagger-like teeth sinking deeply into your supple flesh while their unearthly howls fill the ebon night—you would still have to contend with the fact that you might have rabies and would then have to endure a series of painful injections into your abdomen. And this is on top of healing from your wolf-attack wounds.

How does that not frighten you?

Now, whether or not this pack of wolves was feral or was raised specifically to hunt you down because of some wrong that you had done their crazed, multi-billionaire master is inconsequential. The issue at hand is this: there are such animals as wolves, they might attack me, and I am frightened of them.

Go ahead. Call my fear of wolves irrational. But when they’ve surrounded your house and are waiting for you to run out of food and fall into a weakened state so they can rush in and tear you apart, then you can tell me who’s irrational.

I’m not advocating the destruction of all wolves everywhere or even setting up wolf traps around my house to make sure they can’t hurt me. I’m not even saying we should create a serum that can be injected into wolves that makes them glow a bright green so we can see them coming from far away.

I’m just saying that wolves frighten me.

Oh, and, also genetically-engineered spiders the size of hatchbacks that are super-intelligent and have acidic webbing that can melt steel.