I'm driving along, going the speed limit, minding my own business, when all of a sudden a station wagon charges out of a street on my right. I brake and swerve to the left, into a truck coming the other way.
It was the third time that morning.
The same stupid station wagon kept charging out, or coming straight at us from the other side of the street. I should have been dead – we all should have been dead, but since the station wagon was on a movie screen, we were still alive. I don't know about the other boys and girls in the room (all of us sitting in metal car-shaped desks), but my heart was pumping, my pulse racing, and stains in my armpits and down my back were proof that my sweat glands were working.
It's no wonder I didn't like the classroom portion of driver's education. Between horror films like "Red Asphalt" and "Dead on the Road" and the nerve-wracking training films where everything except a thermonuclear device was thrown at us, I dreaded those 45 minutes in the basement of the basketball gymnasium. By the end of the quarter I had trouble even putting my foot on the accelerator.
The worst part is that the fear generated by those classroom sessions is still with me. It's probably the biggest reason I haven't become a "great" driver. I'm too cautious, too worried about that phantom station wagon. But the station wagon isn't there, so the real problem is the fear.
Fear is powerful. Fear triggers the "fight or flight" instinct in everything that walks or swims or flies through this world, including humans. Fear motivates us in primal ways, leads us down paths and through doors where reason and logic cannot reach us.
For the past few months, I've sampled the different flavors of fear our leaders (and potential leaders) have been selling. Politicians know the power of fear. They have known for eons that they can make fear work for them, by finding someone or something that the people are afraid of, turning citizens into a mob.
Lately, the Republicans have been using fear of terrorism very effectively to bludgeon their opponents and push through all sorts of questionable policies and laws. Take the detainee torture and trial law that Congress passed last week. Is this America? Are we really debating definitions of "acceptable" torture? Did we really suspend a part of our legal system that's been with us since the people of England forced King John to sign the Magna Carta? Unfortunately, every time those sorts of questions get raised, top leaders of the Republican Party, joined by the "nattering nabobs" at Fox News, push the "be afraid, be very afraid" button. People who stand up for the constitution are accused of "coddling" and advocating "cut and run" policies. And how have the citizens responded so far? By joining the mob, fists upraised and ready to fight, or by hiding in the basement.
And the Democrats are just as bad, although they focus fear differently. Many of them beat the same drums of fear as the Republicans, but they would like us to be as afraid of the Bush administration's incompetence as we are of the terrorists. Some Democrats use fear to convince us to walk away from the mess America helped create in Iraq. Some of them have spread rumors about Bush wanting to reinstate the draft.
Everyone wants us to be afraid, so they can move the mob their way.
Is this a cynical view of current events? Possibly, since cynicism is another way to respond to all of this fear-mongering.
A healthier response, publicly expressing our skepticism of Congress's spinelessness or the President's ruthlessness, becomes difficult when anyone who does that is accused of a lack of patriotism or of not supporting the President. There are plenty of bad people in the world right now, who would love to torture and kill every American they get their hands on, including skeptical me. I know that's part of our reality now, but living in fear of them all the time doesn't make them go away.
I live, now, in the hope that we Americans will remember FDR's advice about fear as we consider the direction our country should take in the next few years, and step away from the mob to think about what we're doing. It's a slim hope, but it's all skeptics like me have right now.
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Comments: 10
Simiarly, I don't let fear control how I react to what is going on in the world or in my country. I don't vote for representatives based on fear, I don't stock my pantry with bottled water and flashlights waiting for another attack. What I do do is use my brain and weigh the options to see if I, and through the people I elect, my country is making the right decision as best as I can judge.
So yes, I generally support Bush in the struggle against these people who want to kill me. I would support a piece of toast against people who want to kill me. That does not mean that I am ruled by fear, it means I am ruled by common sense.
Thank you for making my post even more understandable.
Thanks for the response. This is my first foray in the "blogging" world, and it's strange to have readers I never heard of.
Now to your critique:
Of course people can be manipulated by more than simply fear-mongering. Lies work, too, as does bullying -- a different kind of fear.
I think it's wonderful that you survived the attacks on NYC, that you still ride the subway, and that because of intellectual choices -- logic, reason, etc. -- you choose to support the Republican approach to the terrorism.
Out here on the prairie, far away from obvious targets, there are people not so lucky as you, who are afraid -- who've been encouraged to be afraid by our leaders, and to stay afraid by people running for political office. Those politicians are found in both of the major parties, not just the Republicans. And I don't know what Republicans have been doing in New York over the past few years, but out here on the prairie they've been busy spreading fear of homosexuals wanting to get married, fear of public schools undermining "Christian" values, fears of foreigners turning Minnesota into a Spanish speaking country.
So I admire your choices based on intellect, but to dismiss the fear-mongering because it doesn't affect you is pretty ignorant, I think. On it's path to destruction, the mob will carry a few skeptics and freethinkers with them.
Or is what you say just points of view that I take, disect , and figure out for myself whether I believe you or not. Just because someone has a different point of view, or sees an urgency in certain issue, does not make them a fear monger, or ignorant, or any other name you can think of to call them when you have no answer to their argument.
FDR combated fear by starting up the draft, raising taxes, building up the military and then bombing the shit out of whole cities. That's exactly what we should be doing to Iran right now. However, my biggest fear is that we just keep doing what we've been doing until we finally get nuked ourselves.
Sounds like a sure-fire formula for inviting waves of 9/11-magnitude attacks on a regular basis! What, pray tell, have the 70 million people of Iran done to deserve this?