Laquephobia (Fear Of Nooses)

Some things are only as scary as you allow them to be. Silly stories like these that make national news with a tone of such import don't impart information so much as they induce phobia. You could hang up a loop of yarn and a news crew would soon be on hand to film it. And a professional infantilizer like Al Sharpton would be on stand-by for a soundbite, shaking his rattle in eager anticipation of capitalizing on the situation:

A student found four nooses in a classroom at Central Michigan University earlier this week, the school said Thursday.

The student found the nooses in a section of the Engineering and Technology Building typically used by senior engineering students. They were made of compressed gas lines that are typically used in laboratory work, according to a news release.

Michigan state Sen. Hansen Clark said he met with the university president to discuss how to handle the incident. He plans to make a statement Friday on whether the university will ask federal authorities to investigate the case.

"There was no reason for the nooses to be hung like that," Hansen said. "The community is looking at this as a racist act."

Back when I was in Tallahassee in the early nineties, every month or so a middle-aged man would come into the ibrary dressed in full Nazi regalia and parade around. From there he'd go cruise the aisles of the grocery store. What a disappointment it must have been to him that nobody rose to his bait. Nowadays there'd be a helicopter crew filming his march from on high.
If when you went in for shots as a kid your parents acted like it was a scary deal, you thought it was a scary deal too. They had induced a fear of needles. How much more ridiculous is a phobic reaction to an object from which no one involved has any personal memory of trauma whatsoever; and how much more foolish some in the media look when they race to cover the innocuous.