It’s an edgy moment, and there are dangers looming. The horror of what we’ve just seen in the Katrina zone is still alive. But sounding alarms is one thing. Sounding alarmist is another.
A popular thread here recently asked us to be afraid. It made good points about the political situation but I found myself reacting to the title. For several reasons.
First, a time of danger is not a time for fear. It’s a time for courage.
And second, fear has been the most potent weapon in the Bush-Rove arsenal. It’s bad for the country, and bad for your health. An expert says so today in The Nation, and below the fold.
Dr. Mark Siegel writes about it on the Nation’s site:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051003/msiegel
I want to emphasize his point on focus. When your fear is being manipulated, or you don’t get a grip and engage some perspective, you wind letting disproportionate fears drive out your ability to respond to real and present dangers. Like a hurricane, for instance.
Here’s part of what Siegel writes:
Meanwhile, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control, in 2001 heart disease killed 700,142 here; cancer 553,768; accidents 101,537; and suicide 30,622. Murders (not including the victims in the attacks of September 11) accounted for 17,330 deaths that year. The number of children who died in their infancy in 2001 was 27,801, and their deaths were no less horrible or frightening for those involved than the attack on the World Trade Center.
Realizing that we have been conned into being afraid is the first step toward learning a new set of skills to assess risk. Fear must be reserved for real danger. Each step away from false worry is a step toward true health.
Another point: letting emotions run away with us can mean we miss opportunities. For example, many of the things people were complaining that Democrats weren’t saying, were being said yesterday by John Kerry and John Edwards, and earlier by others. And said well. I urge everyone to look at Kerry’s speech at Brown U. carefully.
Kerry emphasizes that our politics emerge from the simple premise that we are all in this together. That’s not just politics. It’s governance, but it’s not just that either. It’s a way of life.
It’s also why a time of danger is a time for courage. Because you’re no good to anyone else if you can’t function. Simply thinking of how you can help is also an antidote. If you concentrate on what others need, you can loosen the grip of fear.
Finally, I’m going to be saying some alarming things myself on this site in the near future. There is plenty to be afraid of, and there’s plenty I’m afraid of. But I don’t believe things are hopeless.
Maybe that’s why I admire H.G. Wells, whose birthday is today (Sept. 21). He forecast some of the major horrors of the 20th century, and saw too many of them come true. His son believed he was deeply pessimistic.
But he also got the reputation of being an unrealistic optimist, because he saw so much in the human potential. Here is something he said in his 1913 address, “The Discovery of the Future”:
I believe that, too. So in the near future, especially when people like me are going on about this tragic need or that horrific trend, please remember this possibility.
We may not be around for the awakening. But we can contribute to it happening. Sometimes all we can do is bear witness as clearly as we can to our own time, and hope that something lodges in some young mind or heart, or the collective unconscious or the morphic resonance or the Dharma, or maybe just the Internet.
And when you’re older and you see people marching for peace and justice, you can be sad it’s still necessary, but you can know they are marching because you marched on Washington in 2005. Just as I know that some of you will be marching this weekend because I did in 1963 and 1968 and 1971. I’d be with you this time if I could get away.
For those of you on your way to Washington, I wish you courage.
In a diary a few months ago by Cali Scribe on Prayers for Peace, a particular post by Its Simple if You Ignore the Complexity struck me. I’m not a religious person, but I can still find hope and courage to keep going in these words.
A prayer by Archbishop Romero, given shortly before his assassination
– – –
It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision. * We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us. * No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything. * This is what we are about: We plant seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities. * We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, and opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest. * We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own. * Amen *
– Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero
We Americans seem to live in a lot more fear than others around the world.
The extent of the damage done by Katrina because of the geography of New Orleans will probably never be reproduced in our lifetimes, but now every storm will be greeted with mass evacuations and 24 hour news coverage.
Folks seem to be blissfully unaware that the likelihood of their keeling over at the dinner table of a coronary occlusion is infinitely greater than the chance that Osama will murder them in their beds.
As you say, George W.’s handlers feed on this fear – I’d love to see someone add up the 9/11 references he’s made in speeches in the last four years.
As to:
Recently, I commented to Booman that I thought this would be a waste of time, but I guess my old ’60’s self is responding to the fire bell. I hope it comes off big and loud and orderly.
We in America seem to be a lot more fearful partly because we are just as scared of lifestyle-threatening events as we are of life-threatening events. This disconnect-of-scale just makes us less able to deal with those problems we can solve.
Fear of life-style threatening events is exactly the type of fear I have seen here in Windsor (just across from Detroit) in the last 24 hours.
We are so dependent on oil and gas, people have been waiting in long lines to fill up their tanks, before Rita “sends” the prices spiraling out of control.
I took this picture this morning, with gas still at 99 cents/liter. The lines were much longer last night. I asked someone last night why everyone was in line and he told me that today (Thursday) gas would be up to $1.70/liter.
This picture was take at about 8:30 this morning. This is just around the corner from my house and I have never seen more than 5 cars in there at one time.
Foreign policy of every nation is based on fear of the US.
So yes, while Americans may live in more fear, fear of more things, that is the price that must be paid for being so feared by all those other people.
“Realizing that we have been conned into being afraid is the first step toward learning a new set of skills to assess risk. Fear must be reserved for real danger. Each step away from false worry is a step toward true health.”
Thank you for that! My energy needs to go towards loving my children and trying to make a difference. Bush, Inc doesn’t deserve any of my energy to be draped in fear.
Fear… that is how they “won”. Took over. Thta is how they lead. That is why they are wrong.
Thanks you oh Captain my Captain
but I was. I was afraid to speak my truth until it robbed me of life and vitality. I used to think the computer would blow up in my face sometimes after I hit enter, I was very scared. I have challenged it though. Then when I went to Crawford my Aunt and cousin were scared to death I would be jailed or get beat up. I was already there when I heard the fears of others, but I had met Buddy and I knew I had a lawyer. Jail is only jail, so what. Getting beat up is only a bruise or whatever and it will heal and I will most likely survive. What I will not survive is the death of my heart and the death of my soul and the death of my higher self and awareness. Without those things I become the walking dead and I wither and decay from the inside out and spew my internal bile without understanding where it comes from and why I am so ill.
Tracy, maybe what kept you challenging and walking forward and fighting was not fear… but was your passion and your love(?)
🙂
Sometimes fear is just less important than doing what one thinks is right. Some people call this “Courage”.
Awesome diary. An excellent book I read, called The Gift of Fear, says that true fear is a gift because it keeps us safe. But you have to distinguish true fear from worry, anxiety, and fretting that simply drain away your energy and resourcefulness without actually doing anything to keep you safe.
If you can’t do anything about it, worrying doesn’t help at all. If you can do anything about it, do it rather than worrying.
Gavin deBecker.
Women worry more about appearing to be rude or bitchy instead of listening to their inner warnings/alarms.
Incredible book.
Natural fear is a deeply rooted characteristic of our psyche linked to whatever we refer to as our survival instinct. It allows us to respect and appreciate the power, or the threat of something coming our way and to take steps to help insure our survival.
When fear is deliberately inculcated into our psyches by clever and incendiary propagandists, however, it’s purpose is to paralyze our ability to evaluate and reason. By emotionalizing fear, by weaponizing it in this way, we are led to abandon rationality and submit our own psychological autonomy to domination by others in authority. In short, we become a herd of terror-stricken animals, ready and willing to follow anyone or anything that promises us safety and security. People in a state of emotional turmoil are always more vulnerable to suggestion than those who can still marshall the ability to question what they’re being told
This is the genesis of war, of racism, of religious conflict, (war), of ethnic and tribal and cultural disharmonies. It is the rubric by which we continually fail to accord equality to our fellow man.
Inculcating fear, and weaponizing the ignorance of those made fearful, is at the very heart of the wingnut propaganda machine.
Felt that you were responding to me from a few days ago. Couple of points though. Without fear, there is no courage. When I said “scary times indeed” in a recent comment, I was, in effect asking folks to step to the plate, as you do here. (I once heard courage defined by a RAF pilot who survived the Battle of Britain. He said courage was being terribly afraid to do something, but then doing it as best you could anyway. Or something like that) Second point concerning being scared about the wrong things. Just because something is improbable, doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Case in point: what are the odds of two category 4 or 5 hurricanes entering the Gulf of Mexico and coming ashore in the U.S. within a month?? Otherwise, I agree with your posting, and appreciate your optimism.
A coward dies a thousand deaths, but a brave man only one.
As one who has anxiety, and pretty darn debilitating a points, that saying has a lot of meaning for me. Anxiety, like phobias, is irrational fear. Like the woman who had a potato phobia. Say what? But hey, all phobia’s are irrational, doesn’t make too much difference if it’s a fear of flying, snakes or potatoes. The fact that most of us don’t see potatoes as dangerous is irrelevant.
My anxiety has been intense since 911. Fuckers. And I mean you pharmaceutical fuckers too. If my problem were say, actually fucking, well then you’d have something for me. Otherwise, you’ll sell me the fear and the “fix”. And then more fear.
Part of anxiety is what John Irving called the undertoad. My undertoad feeds on cognitive dissonance. A visceral reaction to the big lies, right out of the crazy making play book. There is a shift now, the cognitive dissonance recedes and the big lies are laid bare. There is rational fear, it’s been buried beneath a sack of potatoes, but it’s in there. Once I see it, once I sort it, I move. Fear into action.
Thanks for all the courageous comments. It’s important for us to share how we are dealing with our fears, even when sensitivity to them is a result of terrible personal experiences or even just how we’re constituted. Fear is contagious, which is what those who use it to manipulate us count on, but courage can be contagious, too. And several responses here have shown that courage. Courage isn’t always the absense of fear. Much of the time, it’s an attitude towards fear.
Of course fear is a survival mechanism; few of us would survive for very long without it. But we can cultivate our consciousness to make sure we can evaluate threats with reasonable accuracy and proportion, and sharing information is one way to help us do that.
For instance, knowing that television, even the “news”, hooks viewers by engaging their basic responses, like fear. We’re constituted to pay special attention to what might threaten us, which can be anything from sudden motion to something different in our environment. But consciousness allows us to exercise judgment. If we realize that TV employs the conventions of drama in order to keep us watching, then we can factor that in. It doesn’t mean that what they report isn’t factual. We should listen to our intuitions. But we can use our heads, too.
These are my thoughts and intuitions, I hasten to add, and not the result of any special training or profession.
The fear I feel is something new for me. It is the fear that what will bring us down will come from within tne walls that have been erected to keep out what they tell us we should fear.
Something to chew on while we’re scaring ourselves silly over weather we cannot control. I’d really like to see someone get the courage to stand up and do something about this: