[cryout-multi][cryout-column width=”1/4″] [/cryout-column] [cryout-column width=”1/2″]
BS ‘n’ About…
Fear Itself
Just a generation ago, we found joy in our excesses. We ate too much, drank too much, and smoked too much. We drove big, gas-guzzling cars, and we drove them too fast. We were the Ugly Americans decked out in our Hawaiian shirts and Japanese cameras, fearlessly setting out to make the concierges of this world miserable.
We raised our kids to confront their fears, to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and get back in the game. We gave them a world that was relatively safe and let them find their way in it. We made them a national priority.
Our politicians set out to make the world safe from the “Bad Guys” and we followed them with a naive courage born of being the “Good Guys”. Candidates dared to have platforms and personal lives because they weren’t yet terrorized by the free press. They dared to take stands. They told us to fear not. They told us that the only thing to fear was fear itself.
Yet these days we are a nation drowning in our fears. We are afraid of what we eat, what we drive, and who we sit next to on the bus. We are afraid for our health, our kids, and our job. We are afraid of tomorrow and our retirements downright terrify us.
Fear is an easy sell so everyone is using it these days. The airwaves bombard us with fear. Every new study takes something we like out of our life. The six o’clock news dredges up the most horrifying aberration it can find and dumps it in the middle of our living rooms. Politicians focus on our fears to push through platforms that aren’t in our best interests. Corporate sponsored educational research comes up with something new to fear on a daily basis. Madison Avenue decks out our kids in armor to ride their bikes and fills our elders with drugs they don’t need.
Fear is changing who and what we are as a people. It has isolated us from our world and the people in it. In one generation we’ve come to mistrust our neighbors, our employers, our government, and the guy sitting next to us on the bus. We can’t let our kids out of our sight. We pretty much assume everyone is lying to us. We don’t really feel a part of the process anymore.
“Back in the old days” when we were thrown together to work and play, we had to get to know each other so we learned to emphasize our similarities. In today’s increasingly solitary workplaces and living environments, it is the differences which stand out, the aberrations which grab our attention.
The Information Age fills our lives with gruesome murders and plant closings, environmental catastrophes and designer diseases, international saber rattling and crime sprees. This stuff sells newspapers. But very little of it affects any of our lives. Very little of it is anything we can do anything about. Much of it is cause for fear and worry. Most of that seems needlessly fabricated.
We are living George Orwell’s 1984. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Big Brother has kept us on a constant war footing by creating one Third World bad guy after another. September 11th brought phrases like ‘evildoer’, ‘Freedom Fries’, and ‘Homeland Security’ into our vocabulary while removing any dialogue for reason or restraint, labeling it unpatriotic at best, treasonous at worst. Orwell’s doublespeak: reprogramming through vocabulary.
Fear is changing who and what we are as a people. We drive SUVs the size of tanks to protect ourselves from the other guys driving SUVs the size of tanks. Every time some lab mice die, we change our diet yet again. We regularly go to the polls and vote against what we fear instead of for what we need. Anytime anything happens to anyone anywhere, we get to worry whether it will happen to us, too.
Today’s world is no more or less dangerous than it was a generation ago. …or ten generations ago. Each era offers it’s own challenges and rewards. The Information Age is upon us and it is driven by fear. Perhaps the challenge this time around is learning to be better than that. Perhaps the reward is finally learning to live without fear.
- [/cryout-column] [cryout-column width=”1/4″] [/cryout-column] [/cryout-multi]