The sheep accept the weather. It doesn’t seem to matter to them.

December 11, 2008 – I went on my book tour the week the market started to crash. I don’t want TV news, ever, and rarely see a paper. So I was not used to the panic pouring out of the screens that were everywhere on the book tour. I should have been, but was stunned by the panic being generated by the new information culture.
  When I worked for Wired Magazine and Rolling Stone, I wrote about the impact of the Internet (I imagined a website just like this one), and one of my favorite topics was memetics, the study of memes, or ideas that move like a virus and are transmitted electronically via the Internet, cell phones, TV and radio.
  Not too long ago, we got our news once or twice a day, and maybe watched the evening news. Now we get our news all day, and media have become an environment, with infinite time and space to fill. Media transmit hysterias, to a large extent. Storms are not about the weather, but panic, and so is almost everything, including the economy. I got an e-mail from a man who wondered if he should move out of the country with his family, and I just shook my head. I told him to go out and buy a new book by the financial writer Michael Lewis called “Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity.”
  Lewis understands our loopy economy, and the way panics are built into the current system of markets. Panics occur regularly, he reminds us, and are followed by booms. One really can’t exist without the other and each time a panic occurs, the media seem to discover it for the first time and present the world as a kind of Armageddon. I recommend it to people who are understandably anxious, but could use some perspective.
  I am reverting to a different media approach. News once a day, not after mid-afternoon. And not all that much of it. What I am getting is that we are going to change our economy, and perhaps build a different kind of one. We aren’t going to spend money like we have, or waste so many things. Personally, I welcome that part of it. I have been wasteful and oblivious, and I ought to know better, living on a farm in a beautiful place. The world is changing, but it is not coming to an end.
 The notion of walls crumbling is a panic, and while the economic realities are real and serious, panic is pointless and emotional. How can anyone hear this stuff all day and not be alarmed?
 I am, in my own life, learning not to panic, and I am not missing it. I respond with my stories, my photos, my life. I am not in the business of giving advice to other people, but I do share a part of mine.
  And I am learning from a number of sources, including the animals, that panic is never real, even if problems are. I was reminded of this watching the sheep during the storm, then listening to the hysteria pouring out of the radio – don’t go out, don’t drive. One of my neighbors a farmer came by and I asked him how bad things were. Bad?, he asked, looking at me. It’s just snowing. Bad was when my barn caught fire and killed all of my dairy cows.