Have you been to a grocery store lately? More and more of them have little push-top bottles of chemical hand cleaner at the door. Some of them have chemical-infused wipes at the door too. I saw a woman approach the bottle and squirt the chemicals onto her hands. Then she pulled out one of the wipes and swiped them over the handle of the grocery cart. She needed to. She wore a turban and was obviously undergoing cancer treatments.

But what about the scores of perfectly healthy people who do what she did. What are they afraid of?

Whatever it is, it’s baffling. I know we live in America, where we have the shortest life-spans of any developed country, but still. We’ve got flu shots, antibiotics that mostly work, and clean water. How likely is it that we’re at risk from a few germs?

But speaking of water, it’s an indication of how easy it is to scare people. Marketing machines have created such a fear of water that millions of people still buy bottled water, even in Boston, which has good tasting, tested tap water, coming from two beautiful reservoirs.  Compare the natural beauty of the Wachusett, which is best viewed from the Tower Hill Botanical Garden, to the corporate bottling plant that squirts “spring” water into plastic bottles. One would think everyone would prefer Wachusett. Who knows who tests bottled water and how? There appear to be no regulations governing this product.

More fear-mongering is coming. There’s an email going around from Bluffdale, Utah, alerting you that the likelihood of disaster, according to the Homeland Security Advisory System, is “High” and you can qualify for a year’s supply of freeze-dried food so you’ll be prepared when that disaster strikes. You should probably be more afraid of the freeze-dried food than a disaster predicted by a bunch of alarmists with a strange product to sell.

Now, there are some things I’m afraid of.

At the top of the list are pastors. A good number are either burning Korans, going bankrupt with their tasteless crystal churches, or preying sexually on women not their wives and defenseless children. Keep them away from me.

Campaign ads also strike fear in my heart. Thank goodness the election is over. The voices in the ads sounded like something out of a horror film, a genre to which I don’t subscribe. The idea that such scare tactics would work scared me.

I’m also afraid of flying, though I do it regularly. I learned that the air goes faster over the top of the wing than the bottom and somehow that lifts the plane. But I really don’t believe it. Nevertheless, I’ve put my faith in physics the way creationists put their faith in Genesis. Neither of us knows what we’re talking about.

I asked a couple of friends what they’re afraid of. Shari Thurer, a clinical psychologist who lives on Beacon Hill, said she’s afraid of jaywalking. So she always crosses a street at a walk light. Places like Boston where jay-walking is common make her anxious, and she’s always looking for law-abiding places. “The only place I was happy was in Japan,” she said. Shari also doesn’t drive, a fear she indulges because in Boston she doesn’t need a car.

She said that clinical anxiety—that which is significant enough to interfere with people’s lives and get them to seek treatment—affects about nine percent of the population. But minor fears and phobias are common.

It begins in childhood with the bogeyman and the monsters under the bed, she explained. Advertisers use people’s fears of germs, dirt, and even socialism to sell products or try to persuade the public to support certain agendas. The more paranoid a population, the more it is susceptible to all kinds of magical thinking, she said, and we’re both thinking that if the last election was any indication, we’re a paranoid society.

She said that among patients being treated for anxiety, psychologists are noting an increase in fears of food and food fetishes, for example, when people will eat only locally grown food or organic food. It’s probably good to eat locally grown food, but the other kind isn’t dangerous. These fears, she said, are not valid, nor are they healthy. And lots of disproven conditions get lots of play. “A sugar high?” she suggested. “People absolutely believe in this.”

Diane Valle of Charlestown had another take on fears. She said she is afraid of them. “Fear is the opposite of knowing,” she said. “I’m most afraid of when fear takes hold and you lose the ability to solve the problem.”

Valle said she saw in our culture a tendency to get panicky about everything, even small stuff. When people behave otherwise it is noted. She cited Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III, the US Airways pilot who landed his crippled plane on the Hudson, as the other kind of person and the one to emulate. In the face of a valid fear, he kept his cool.

“There are things that create fear,” she said, “but don’t let it take hold.”

Valle hasn’t always followed her own advice. She said when her daughter was little, she became sick and then dehydrated. The doctor ran an IV into the little girl’s toe, and Valle could hardly bear it.

“I can handle the elephants,” she said. “I can’t handle the ants.”