Donald Trump jokes about Putin killing 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, with his poll numbers only climbing the more he does so.
The NRA makes the leap from Obama wanting to close the gun show loop hole, wanting to make it mandatory to obtain background checks for people wishing to purchase guns at gun shows and on the internet – 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.
Cowards in congress crawl over each other in their distortions of threat from our southern border despite there being overwhelming evidence the poor people who are walking thousands of miles to pursue a chance for better lives for themselves and their children present no threat at all.
How is this possible? 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, big brother coming to get you (which by the way you’re not going to stop if they truly wanted to, guns or no guns), drugs we wage ‘war’ on, road rage, violent criminals, the loss of the white majority, the loss of our way of life. Most, if not all, greatly exaggerated, imagined threats, with little or no evidence to support 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 full bike racks – dozens of other kid’s bikes. 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 simply is not real.
Why? Fear – of imagined threat.
Barry Glassner has been eloquently telling us in his book ‘The Culture of Fear’ for two decades now that we live in fear of imagined threat and it’s getting out of hand. Three of four Americans say they feel more fearful today than twenty years ago – despite dramatic reductions in crime on children, in violent crime in general…..
Your odds of being killed by a terrorist – even given recent events – is 55 times less likely than your odds of being struck by lightning, 100 times less than slipping in your shower and breaking your neck, 500 times less than being killed while driving. And yet according to a recent CNN poll, the number one fear of Americans today is being killed by terrorists.
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 in their neighborhoods, at their local grocery stores, or in their daycares. This idea that we cannot let our children out of our sight, even for a moment, is a reaction to irrational fear perpetrated in great part by continual media bombardment of extremely rare events. Fear equals ratings or political control – and it’s systematically destroying 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 bombardment of the latest fear, the latest threat – it’s nearly impossible to remain rational. We loose perspective with our fears becoming way out of proportion to reality – exactly the intent of those that want to profit from them.
Extremism, intolerance, hate, even violence only too often has roots in irrational fear. People don’t like feeling afraid. They strike out. Our culture of fear then goes a long way to explaining Donald Trump, cable ‘news’, an almost completely dysfunctional congress, maybe even our mass shootings. It certainly explains play dates and the robbing of our children of their independence and self exploration.
We simply have no choice but to develop a stiff upper lips as it were – refuse to live in fear and get on with living. We must work hard to keep things in perspective – self inform, limit our exposure to media and political hype, and recognize what it is when we see it. We simply cannot let fear be our guidepost in life. WE must relearn thoughtfulness, tolerance and the patience and skills needed to listen, really listen, and to respectively talk to each other. Calm down and allow compassion and acceptance of others back into our hearts. Demand that our leaders, lead. I want to hear what they are going to do – not what is wrong with their opponents.
Finally, turn off that TV at least for awhile, and let’s go show our children how to ride his or her bike to school – alone.
