Fear and Intolerance

Donald Trump jokes about Putin murdering reporters while telling us he admires the man, and people think it’s great. He regularly makes hurtful, racist slurs, lies compulsively, and does so with all the finesse, grace, and charm of an ape throwing excrement around, and the more he does so, the more his poll numbers climb.

The NRA makes the leap from Obama wanting to slightly expand common sense gun control by closing the gun show/internet loop hole – a plan of action the NRA itself used to support – to dressing Obama up in military garb in Photoshop and making the extraordinary claim that this is an attempt of Obama’s to ‘take away everyone’s guns. ‘

What on earth is going on here? In a word – fear.

Extremism, divisiveness, intolerance, hate, even violence too often has roots in irrational fear. ‘They’ are coming to get us. Be ‘they’ extreme Islamic jihadists, the brown hoard pouring over our southern borders to ruin our way of life, pedophiles lurking for our children, a corrupt big brother coming to get you and/or your guns (which by the way you’re not going to stop if they truly wanted to, guns or no guns), road rage, violent criminal acts, the loss of our way of life. Most, if not all, greatly exaggerated, imagined threats, with little or no evidence to support them.

There are those in the media and in politics that use fear as a means to an end. Fear equals ratings and/or control – it’s use, as such, systematically harming our country. It only takes one video clip of a stranger leading a child out of a store, with no attempt to put the event in perspective, to change our culture in ways that are harmful. Now try to withstand constant media, talk show, and politically motivated hype of the latest fear, the latest threat and it’s nearly impossible to remain rational. We have lost perspective; our fears are way out of proportion to reality – fears propagated by those who would profit from them.

When I was a child I used to ride my bike to elementary school. The freedom and sheer joy of getting myself to school while zooming along something I loved dearly. In front of the school were dozens of other bikes crammed into full racks. Today kids do not ride or even walk to school. They are accompanied by their parents all the way into their classrooms. If I were to let my 8-year-old ride her bike the ½ mile to school or to play in our neighborhood on her own, as I did at her age, Id most likely be arrested for child endangerment. Endangerment that is simply not real.

The vast majority of crimes against children occur in the homes they or their relatives live in, perpetrated by those they know and trust – not strangers lurking behind bushes, at their local grocery stores, or in their daycares and churches. This idea that we cannot let our children out of our sight, even for a moment, is a reaction to irrational fear perpetrated in large part by continual media bombardment of extremely rare events. The odds of your child being abducted by a stranger are about the same as your child being stuck by lightning - 1:700,000 per year, and yet I’ve not seen tin foil hats becoming all the rage. For perspective your child’s odds of dying in an automobile accident are 1:800 per year.

Three of four Americans say they feel more fearful today than twenty years ago – despite dramatic reductions in crime on children, and in violent crime in general. 44.4% of Americans rank fear of being harmed in a terrorist attack among the top four of their greatest fears according to a recent poll. And yet their odds of being killed by a terrorist – even given recent events – is about 1 in 17 million per year - less than being crushed by an unstable television set or piece of furniture in you’re home, 900 times less likely than being killed while driving, or 4 times less likely than being struck by lightning in any given year.

People don’t like feeling afraid. They strike out, become rigid, divisive, intolerant, angry. Our collective fear then goes a long way to explaining Donald Trump, cable ‘news’, an almost completely dysfunctional congress, our inability to discuss differences calmly and with respect, and perhaps even our mass shootings. It certainly explains play dates in place of spontaneity and the robbing of our children of their independence and self exploration. 

Perhaps if we all worked harder to keep things in perspective – self inform, limit our exposure to media and political hype, and recognize what it is when we see it; a more rational outlook with more tolerance, compassion, and respect could find its way back into our lives. One thing is sure - we simply cannot allow irrational fear to be our guidepost any longer.