America Founded on Fears?
Can you tell me how many of these fears are unfounded?
The United States is roiling with them — we pick them up on social media, hear them from our friends.
The pinpricks in your feet when you wake up in the morning, an atmospheric pressure, the coursing roll of nerves rippling down your back: we might call it the times. We’re living through a global health crisis.
But I think it’s got something more to do with a rot in the marrow of our bones. What’s coursing through all of us right now is our collective crisis.
There’s no denying it despite what “side” you’re on — America is hurting.
Are your fears being heard?
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Do you worry that the United States Government has not responded well to this pandemic?
Isn’t it strange that there is a pandemic? That something like this has managed to rage for eight months, and they’re saying eight more, and eight more? Weird, threatening that we’re being asked to protect others, then ourselves?
Is it more horrifying that you have been encouraged to restrict yourself to a new routine at the expense of your constitutional freedom, or that the acting government has stalled relief checks until after an election?
Are you wavering, wondering whose responsibility it is to care for the sick or the spread of infection? Are you more afraid that sickness will be an individual failure, or a collective fall?
Do you stem your terror of falling ill with the belief that this pandemic has given us space to better ourselves? Or are you worried that, rather than caring more about one another and becoming more aware of others’ suffering, the pandemic is making us more self-protective, self-centered, selfish?
Are you more alarmed at the thought that your neighbor is selfish and violent, or that your government is? Might it be both?
But perhaps you are fearful that the real problem in the United States right now is not the global pandemic, nor your neighbor, nor a figurehead but rather it is the Whole Damned Thing.
Are you terrified of a Deep State, of our systemic inequality?
Our corporate cold-heartedness, our disrespect for the impoverished and suffering, the deathly vision of the “American Dream” that can be hell for those who pursue it?
Are you wondering whether this dream leaves space for more than that top 1% to be our Gods, to call the shots, to have enough money and power to flout the law? (Were you never afraid that Trump desired the presidency in the first place so his actions that could be judged as crimes — financial and otherwise — might fall to political clemency?)
Your heart heaves, your stomach churns. Since when did money become our spirituality, and profit become Apollo’s chariot?
Since when was it so hard for people like you to make good money?
Since when was your money threatened like it’s being threatened today, since when was its power called so dearly into question? Are you afraid of socialism, or afraid that you will never achieve your American Dream?
Will you ever achieve your American Dream, the one that flouts mathematics: the lottery-like chances where 99% of the population can never hold as much wealth as the 1%. How scared are you that it is a scam?
Maybe you’re ill at the thought that we’re trapped in a machine that chews up the most vulnerable. We’ve seen how the most affordable and reliable health insurance comes through corporations or perhaps cozy government jobs, but even employer-based health insurance is a crapshoot. This forces those of us with chronic health conditions to seek employment we otherwise would not seek.
Does this mean that only the most privileged can afford to follow their own paths because the rest have their necks bent under the yoke of crappy work? Is it true that low wages and no decent health care traps people in monotonous and strenuous jobs?
Is it not unreasonable to anguish, wondering whether the powerful and rich — like dear Jeff Bezos, who retracted healthcare from part-time workers of Whole Foods despite making 4.4 million dollars an hour in 2018; despite being criticized for abusive work conditions; despite the guillotines that have gone up outside of his $23 million D.C. mansion, yet does not deign to share his skyrocketing wealth during a pandemic — might want these people to be stuck right there?
But it’s more the politicians who want you to get stuck. Isn’t it?
Do you believe the raging liberals’ predicting that a Trump victory this time around will end in fascism, dictatorship, the Death of Democracy? Scared that Trump’s cries to once again distort American history as the history of a “miracle” of a country is a cheap fascist hack?
(Are you more fearful of our democratic soul-death here — on home soil — or globally?)
Maybe you believe the premonitions of the raging conservatives that your suburbs will be gutted and overtaken with a Biden win? Or, worse — rather than tearing suburbs apart, the Democrats will remake them, shipping dangerous and wily low-income folks into your quiet and crime-free neighborhood?
Are you fearful of losing your comfort, your stability, your whole way of life to some “other” social force? That your child’s schools, your community center, your religion, your peace will suffer for it?
Have you suffered?
Have you flinched as you watched others suffer — trembled, imagining how they’ve lacked comfort, slipped into instability, been denied a whole way of life? Did a scream force its way from your gullet when you saw it? Were you enraged for the injustice, for the fear that it would happen to you, too?
Perhaps you wilt, wondering whether any call to uphold human rights standards might be a farce. Prick your soft finger on America’s fangs: as of 2019, the United States ranks 75th globally out of 193 countries regarding women’s representation in government, and in the same year 10.5% of the population existed at poverty level.
Are you finding that America is a beast of a country with instances of school shootings, police violence, abusive actions in ICE camps, crushingly competent corporations, lying lobbyists and sycophant politicians? Do you panic when you remember there is still a call to “Make America Great Again?”
Are you more afraid that America will never be Great Again, or that it was never great in the first place?
Do you howl knowing the United States is a country that has perpetuated and continues to sanction human rights abuses amongst ethnic minorities, most recently in ICE detention centers and concentration camps at the southern border of our country? This America has voluntarily withdrawn from the U.N. Human Rights council, and stonewalled UN human rights watchdogs with silence. Here, pundits defend white militant youth for vigilante killings while denying the severity of racial injustice in the United States and downplaying the deaths and mutilations of our society’s least-favored groups.
Do you fear that there will come a time when the government really does look back on the United States’ Civil War history, finds that white Southerners are a least-favored group, takes up the flag of “let’s get on with it” and kills the culture of statues and symbols that give you a reason to recall with pride the principled defenses of your slave-owning ancestors?
Are you quivering, knowing that today’s American government already has looked back on our country’s Civil Rights history and imagines that we have made such leaps and bounds away from prejudice and killing and racism that they explicitly “get on with it”? That they’ve expressed it through protest suppression?
But, you wail, Americans must have the ability for the people to gather and fight for their freedoms! A constitutional guarantee, no? Whether it’s feeling foul about the prospect of wearing masks or feeling foul when your cousin is killed: you have the right to scream it to the sky, and get your neighbor’s heads to turn, too.
But shouldn’t the government respond with force, when and amongst those peaceful protestors are rioters, looters and thugs?
Or are they calling out thugs to serve their status quo? Do you cringe, reading that in September, The Guardian cited that 97% of BLM protests have been peaceful?
So you must have shivered when you heard how people participating in this summer’s protests have been crushed. Beaten with batons, sprayed with gas. Pushed to the ground, heads cracking on pavement.
Is it worse that reports of detainment of protestors in Portland by federal officers in unmarked vehicles have been confirmed, or that it’s questionable whether these might legally be called ”kidnappings”?
Or are you freaked that more wasn’t done to stop the protests? That any law and order will be thwarted, and violence crop up on your lawn?
Does the violence that is justified — hailed, and praised, and valorized — when it comes to military actions, global expansionism and geopolitics leave you aghast? (Do you fear that if we back down on this, you will lose your car or your sustainably sourced coffee or your fat bank account?)
Are you afraid that you will face violence, and that you will suffer? (Are you afraid of meeting the violence you or your words have already meted on someone else?)
Are you fearful that you will never rise from a life of struggle? Are you afraid you will lose the life you have now and descend to that poverty, or sick at the thought of giving up that second home?
No, that’s not right — it’s something larger, isn’t it? That guttural terror. It must stem from something more systemic.
Are you afraid the homosexuals are going to destroy your family values, having finally infiltrated this fine country’s political ranks?
Are you afraid the heterosexuals will destroy your right to have a legally recognized family, undermining decades of fighting to have anyone queerish seen as loving, real, moral, capable of being no more or no less than human?
Or is it just that America’s two-party system, and the toxic political practices of demonizing “the other side,” might be tearing America apart?
Is it that the other side will tear you apart?
And so you’re tortured — the brutes running the system will take your guns and turn them against you. Or, no — take your ballots, so you can’t turn them against them. Or were they going to take your rights, so you’ll never find personal truth in a country that guarantees freedom to all?
I’m getting confused.
Are you afraid because you’re getting confused?
How seductive, now, do conspiracy theories seem to you?
Are you beginning to buy into the idea that we are all “sheeple” and cannot see how we are being manipulated? The media does it by pandering to politicians, by pushing a liberal agenda, and where else are we supposed to get trustworthy information?
But maybe you’re scared that your loved ones are conspiracy theorists. Perhaps they will hurt not just themselves because of it, but also others? Concerned that there’s nothing you can do, short of a sting intervention? That their beliefs are threatening to you?
Or is it more terrifying that media freedom is being threatened? That the bulwark of a fourth estate meant to guarantee free information to this country’s population so they can make informed decisions without someone in power telling them what and how to think might crumble under the attacks of a controlling politician?
Are you petrified that America’s current administration not only castigates the media as “fake news,” but also threatens the safety of journalists with public appreciation for violence against them, and has made moves to kill an editorial “firewall” that protects independent journalists of overseas broadcasters from having to manipulate their stories at the whims of politically-appointed editors?
You fear manipulation, don’t you? That someone will force you to change in ways you don’t will?
Maybe you’re just afraid of change.
Or you’re afraid of lack of change?
Are you not wondering whether we are desperate for a change that so few seem brave enough to evoke?
Would you shift from fear if you heard that since the pandemic began, writers have called up instances of “moral courage”? That a trait of an individual to stand up for their moral beliefs, despite the risks to their personal safety and comfort, is not fixed but can be learned?
Have you felt that mass America has no moral courage? But rather, we complain at home about injustices, secretly hoping for change, but too afraid to step out against abuses?
Do you fear that you simply can’t do anything about anything?
We suffer fear and depression and anxiety as we attempt to navigate our way through very entrenched institutions like those of higher education and the criminal justice system and the political system and what system don’t we have to navigate — these institutions built to benefit and support specific segments of society, which segments of society? — and somehow believe this is normal.
“The way it is.”
“There’s nothing that can be done about it, you just have to fight. If you can’t, you’re not strong enough to survive.”
When did anxiety become normal, depression become what happens when you get home from the office (or click out of your Zoom call)?
After people began to tolerate states like depression, began to find empathy for those who suffer from anxiety? When it was no longer taboo to discuss it?
Or was it when we started treating our existential worries with meds and less therapy, making oodles in pharmaceuticals while allowing our fears to romp? When we realized we could numb our patients so that they might continue to work, but not so that we can heal them?*
Are you afraid, like I am, that the powers that be prefer our fear?
(When did we come to accept living in so much fear?)
I am afraid.
I am mostly afraid that there is not a soul who can tell me how — no, worse, that there is not an individual who both has the power and cares enough — to change things.
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* Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books, 1st Edition, 25 September 2014. Kindle Edition.
“The drug revolution that started out with so much promise may in the end have done as much harm as good. The theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs has been broadly accepted, by the media and the public as well as by the medical profession. In many places drugs have displaced therapy and enabled patients to suppress their problems without addressing the underlying issues. Antidepressants can make all the difference in the world in helping with day-to-day functioning, and if it comes to a choice between taking a sleeping pill and drinking yourself into a stupor every night to get a few hours of sleep, there is no question which is preferable. For people who are exhausted from trying to make it on their own through yoga classes, workout routines, or simply toughing it out, medications often bring life-saving relief. The SSRIs can be very helpful in making traumatized people less enslaved by their emotions, but they should only be considered adjuncts in their overall treatment (Van der Kolk 36, Kindle Edition).”
