We were talking about some matter of church politics today, doesn’t matter what, when the subject of fear came up. Some sense of fear seems to be driving some people, we decided. But why? We thought about it for a moment, and I said, There’s always the lousy state of the economy; I know that’s injected a fair amount of fear into my life.
In the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt is famous for saying that the only the we have to fear is fear itself. As we struggle to emerge from the Great Recession, there’s a different quality to the fear — it’s mingled in with fears of terrorists, fears of foreigners living among us, fears of losing our honor in Iraq and Afghanistan, fears of looming environmental disasters — but I still would like to have some catchy phrase that helped bring my economic fears out into the light of day where I could look at them clearly.
“Divided we fall.”
Read your post just now immediately after watching an episode of “Stan Lee’s Superhumans,” the one about Super Balance. http://www.history.com/shows/stan-lees-superhumans/bios/#slide-21
It was amazing watching Eskil balance upside-down on a stack of three chairs right next to a thousand foot drop. I couldn’t breathe. Fear is a powerful thing.
The Liberalism we’ve known since 1968 is falling apart. We’re in a moment when all sorts of thinking gets redefined. Old models fall apart, new ones getting made. Conservatives have the Tea Party and despite the goofy tri-corner hates, there’s a real effort to return to the founding fathers for resources and inspiration. UUs a good part of that tradition too. Just look at all the books out on the era. A good deal of what’s coming out of that effort is very Libertarian.
The lefts response, and the response of way too many UUs is to call out people as phobes of one sort or another, and talk about fear.
That’s not wise on our part. Too many UUs made far too much an investment in Obama. That was bound to end badly and now we’re seeing the consequences. The rights vibrant, the lefts in the dumps. We’d be better off following the Tea Partiers and their example of returning to some root thinkers…some of whom happened to have called themselves Unitarians and Universalists too… instead of calling people Phobes.
and I did mean goofy Hates, not Hates… I’ve gone to my local Tea Party demos and they’re a very non-hateful and good natured bunch.
When 9/11 happened, our leader had a choice: he could encourage and build on our sense of unity, or he could emphasize “be afraid, be very afraid.” For the most part, he went with the fear. With fear and paranoia he led us into two wars. They crashed the economy too, in order to keep us afraid, to produce what they really want: cheap labor. It all comes down to the ruling elite wanting cheap labor. They would cut off their nose to spite their face — poison the whole world if it will just get them cheap labor.