“It’s just fear,” I said to my friend Pam on the phone the other day. We were talking about relationships, the great subject of womankind, and I was mentioning a discovery I’d made for about the ten-thousandth time.
“Trudy,” she said, having known me
for more than 40 years, “do you think you could leave off the word ‘just’?”
My mental eyes opened as she
stripped away my protective covering.
Minimizing fear is one of the ways we try to deal with the most natural,
protective instinct we were born with. By
treating my fear as if it is a gnat-sized annoyance, I’m making myself a
gladiator, big enough to spit in its face and walk away. Dealing with what caused the fear is a
different, and actually more productive, response.
I think fear is at the root of the
deep divide that is said to be plaguing the country. If I were to give that fear a name, it is
that people are afraid of being left behind economically because of the group
they belong to, shut out from participating in America’s bounty because of some
categorization scheme. For many this
fear is not “just,” but justified. Many
people have to overcome not just fear, but also handicaps placed on them by
others in order to receive rewards for their efforts.
And it seems to me that the people
placing those handicaps on others are being driven by fear. Is it also justified? Might be worth asking that question.
Fear makes jihadists out of rebels,
revolutionaries out of social discontents.
It makes nations go to war. It
makes men (and women) buy guns to protect their households and their persons
even though the statistics on gun accidents show that people harm themselves
more often than trespassers. It makes
people stop loving each other even when the reasons for loving still exist.
“Fear not,” were the first words I
really comprehended in the Bible when I returned to the church in search of
faith. The Quaker mystic Rufus M. Jones
understood fear’s universal role in conflict, as well as the antidote to fear
that Christianity offers. He wrote this
passage sometime during the prelude to World War II:
“Christ’s major point throughout the
Sermon on the Mount is to get rid of fears and anxieties. It might almost be said that the substance of
his mission as a teacher was to set us free from the slavery of fears. ‘Why are ye so fearful?’ he keeps
saying. Stop your unnecessary worries. Cut out your excessive anxieties. It has been well said that the most ruinously
expensive of all our emotions is fear.
It is that very emotion of fear that has thrown our world out of joint
and brought us to this unspeakable calamity. . . .”
Many of the fears being expressed by
people on my side of the political divide are that the fears being generated and/or
fanned to flames on the other side will push us toward more ‘unspeakable
calamities’ like those we’ve witnessed before: genocides like the Jews’ and Armenians’, wars
like Viet Nam, El Salvador and Afghanistan.
Extinctions like the passenger pigeon, soon to be replicated in the
Arctic, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the Pacific Flyway. In this new realm of “alternative facts,”
there are fears for justice itself moving to the endangered species list.
Pam’s right. It’s time to leave off the word “just” and
learn to deal with our fear another way than minimizing it. It’s time to face the music, so to
speak: the music of democracy is
equality among, not advantage over, others.
Let’s dance.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a neophyte Friend who writes.
You can send her your stories of defeating fear c/o P.O. Box 1374,
Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below. Thanks to Carolyn
Davenport for her loving and helpful feedback.
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