BALTIMORE (Map, News) - You can tell the days we’re supposed to be afraid — they end in a “y.”

No matter what day you wake up, someone somewhere wants you to be afraid to get out of bed.

Or afraid to stay there.

Don’t read this article, you might learn something — or get a paper cut.

Either could be the end of life as we know it.

Are you eating right?

Is there enough bran in your diet?

Is there too much sugar or salt?

Is caffeine good or bad today?

Think it all through while you drink your eight glasses of water.

Oops, water’s out.

Those eight glasses are an old wives’ tale from ancient history of a couple months ago.

Tap water is supposedly bad — too many drugs (or too few).

Bottled water is worse because it hurts Mother Nature to ship it.

God help you if you take either and put it into another plastic bottle.

By the time you’re finished your bacon and eggs, you’re bound to have indigestion just thinking about it all.

Not that you should eat meat.

It uses more grain than going vegan — and vegan food isn’t edible either.

Then you have to save the food so you can hoard against the global food riots.

Sam’s Club and Costco are actually limiting how much rice you can now buy because some folks are hoarding. (That last one wasn’t a joke.)

How folks afford those tasty calories is anybody’s guess because of economic fears.

We might even go into a recession! (Cue scary organ music.)

We forget recessions have hit every few years since we had money and jobs to recess.

Somehow America has survived.

 Leave your house and you fear the unknown.

Maybe we’ll have another sniper or another terrorist attack or a giant robotic Barbra Streisand. (“South Park” fans should get that one.)

The fear about Alar on apples did more harm to growers than to anybody who ate them.

Then there are the lawsuit-driven fears.

Don’t eat that chili at Wendy’s or drink that scary hot coffee at McDonald’s.

Now lawyers are something to fear.

America has created whole industries to promulgate fear.

Think tanks, politicians and, yes, the media make a fortune from our terror. 

Some are mere scolds who say we would live better if only we’d do what they think we should.

Others would make us live better — for our own good.

Time magazine is the latest.

It is so convinced it’s right on global warming that it rips apart the photo of the Iwo Jima flag raising to convince us climate change is our new great war.

I’m sick of it.

I don’t want to fear the reaper.

And if I fear the turtle — that’s only because of how they played last season.

What I really fear is our loss of liberty and control of our own lives as the fear industry runs roughshod over us.

I’d tell you how to fix it in your own lives, but I’m afraid that’s up to each one of you.

Dan Gainor can be seen each week on Friday afternoons on the new Fox Business Network. He is T. Boone Pickens fellow at the Media Research Center’s Business & Media Institute, a career journalist and media commentator. He can be reached at gainorcolumn@gmail.com.