Opinion: Sequester panic nothing but D.C. fear mongering

The spoken word is becoming a pain in the neck. This country can’t seem to go three months without being told of some new economic or universal apocalypse bringing unimaginable doom into our lives. From the Mayans to the fiscal cliff and now on to sequestration we just can’t seem to catch a break. Washington D.C.’s best spin doctors seem to revel in inducing public panic and paranoia over things we should have figured out by now that are not worth panicking over as our professional procrastinators always seem to find an appropriately sized band-aid before our economy bleeds out.The sequester, as most of us now know, is our newest wound that our hypochondriac-elected officials are in a tizzy over. In the last week alone the president has used some very vibrant language that would make anyone’s skin tingle to describe the impending cuts. “They’re nothing but a self-inflicted wound,” Obama said in a recent speech. It will “weaken the basic services the American people depend on.”  He went on to use “meat-cleaver” and “brutal” and “eviscerate” to discuss cuts coming to our education, energy and medical research spending. This evisceration will predictably send American public school students into insurmountable pits of shame as these cuts are bound to move us below Haiti in next year’s science ratings.So what exactly are the cuts the sequester will bring on? Well, $85 billion is on the chopping board off of this year’s $3.6 trillion budget. The panic in The White House is bound to flow over into the streets of Georgetown as DC struggles to get by on 97.7 percent of their initial budget. Over a 10 year period sequestration would bring our budget down from $46 trillion to $44.8 trillion. Obama’s head must be spinning over such a prospect.One can only imagine an increasingly panic-stricken Obama being confronted by increasingly-powerful Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke reminding him that there’s always money in the banana stand. After all, no president in the history of the United States has printed as many Federal Reserve notes as President Obama. For him, money is truly no issue.Luckily for Obama and the rest of DC, they know that misery loves company and when you have an entire nation at your fingertips, evisceration of your constituents’ psyches seems like a proper course of action. The White House recently tweeted a graphic regarding the impact sequestration will have on those with mental illness. The sequester would leave “more than 370,000 seriously mentally ill adults and emotionally disturbed children without treatment,” says the graphic. Any personout there that thinks tweets like this one are supposed to make us come together and not tear us apart is sorely mistaken. Fresh off the Sandy Hook tragedy, mental illness and specifically “mentally disturbed children” are two societal problems that have been shoved to the forefront. The White House is using the issue to pull people on their side of sequestration and making those that don’t fall for such an aggressive slogan feel guilt stricken for having an opposing opinion.Unfortunately, we as a people are becoming used to the language of Washington that invades our Twitter feeds and Facebook pages on a daily basis. It used to be easy to avoid the spoken word just by turning off your TV or flipping straight to the comics section of the newspaper. But DC knows times have changed, and if they want to flood our daily lives and subconscious with the idea that a new financial apocalypse is approaching, they can. If they want to trick us into believing that these cuts (amounting to .5 percent of our gross domestic product) will unravel society as we know it, they can try. If they want us to fight amongst ourselves, we will oblige. It is up to us to shut them out, and to not let fear be a factor any more than it needs to be.