Late 20th century and, Lord knows, early 21st century America has been a time when the powers that be wielded fear like a master surgeon, using it liberally but specifically enough to scare us into doing whatever the hell stupid policy they wanted to implement. Start a war in the Middle East with no exit strategy? Sure, why not. Give up our privacy in response to an attack from a loosely-organized group of people who act like it’s the Middle Ages? Yeah, who needs privacy anyway? Prop up one group of guerrilla fighters against the other in some civil war we barely understand? Of course.
And this particular brand of fear is usually focused so far outside of the boundaries of our daily lives that it’s not real, not like the fear of a tornado or a flash flood or street violence a few streets over. It’s all far away and hazy. This plus the disastrous effects of modern technology have had the effect of making so many aspects of our lives beige, boring, predictable. Because of fear.
Fear is a time-tested control mechanism, an effective one, but only in the short term. People get over fear. Especially hazy, far-away fear. I think America’s response to the “pandemic,” while somewhat fear-based at first, is now, just five short years later, well beyond fear and onto the normal successive emotions: anger and a desire to “get back to normal.” I understand both of those.
We “got back to normal” pretty quickly, but it’s left us with a cistern full of anger. Sometimes it’s focused, like it was at the Democratic Party in the 2024 election, or at the winner of that election after the fact, but more often it’s taken out on wives, husbands, kids, neighbors, co-workers, and people in the car next to us on the street. But since this anger is still highly focused and manipulated by the powers-that-be, it’s generally having the same effect it always does, making things beige and boring.
Saw a news report of a jump-out-a-white-van kidnapping on the other side of the country? Track your kids’ every movement and never let them just play and be kids. Saw a social media post from a stupid internet pseudonym about some dead cows on the other side of the planet? Time to go vegan. Heard that your congressman is bedding teenage wrestlers? Make your kids play a more boring sport.
Can you see the trend?
The fear doesn’t do what well-focused fear could do, if properly channeled, propelling people into greatness. It does the exact opposite. And at a time when human possibility is at its zenith (at least so far). We’re on the verge of populating the cosmos, of curing potentially crippling diseases (if the pharma assholes were interested in curing disease), of being able to talk to each other to relieve xenophobia, suspicion and ingrained hatred. Instead we’re letting our leaders control us into beige submission, when we should be challenging the formerly unquestioned aspects of their leadership styles, their decision-making methodologies and whether or not we even need them. Instead, we’re letting anonymous idiots, assuming they’re even human, tell us to be more afraid than ever. Sure, our weaponry is better than ever, but also now have pathways to peace we’ve never had. North and South Korea could, theoretically, have a weekly zoom call. Russia and Ukraine could, if their leaders were a bunch of power-hungry posers, settle their territorial disputes with a game of pickle ball, instead of the older and much less fun game of mass murder. It all springs from an artesian well of loose fear…but I want to end this one on a positive note.
We don’t have to listen to the fear-mongers. In America at least, we, the people, hold far more power than we think we do. The only reason we don’t exercise this power to the extent we should and could is, you guessed it, fear. Fear that trickles out of the mouths of our politicians (of both parties) as easily as drool from a baby’s mouth, or more appropriately, from the mouths of people far too old to still be in politics.
We don’t need to settle for a beige response when we have such a rich, vibrant wheel of color possibilities. We can respond to fear with neon orange bursts of laughter, or indigo shouts of real populism, or even aqua marine protests of passionate possibility. Our palette is rich with choices.