A friend sent me this linkto a CNN slideshow this morning.
Different people from all over the country describe what they fear. The pictures are all safe for work unless you have a problem with your co-workers seeing you weeping in front of the computer.
I was very disturbed by the elderly woman who has MS and can’t get to church so she fears that she will not see her parents in heaven. It breaks my heart that her God is so strict and punitive. I want to hug her and tell her that whatever God she believes in loves her more than her parents did and more than she loved them, and God doesn’t care whether she goes to church. This one just about made me cry.
Or the homeless man who fears he won’t have a funeral.
The war veterans, and people about to lose their jobs and suffer from deteriorating health conditions… the gays, immigrants, and people of color who (with good reason) fear violence against them…
And I fear that many of the millions who will see these pictures and stories on the CNN site will respond with hatred and scorn and not compassion. THAT is scary.
The modern mass communication age is perfect for fear-mongering. No surprise to me that people’s level of fear is increased by hearing of others that share their fear. I recall FDR’s famous statement, he was right then, and more so now. The perfect example is our failure to close Gitmo, we fear prisoners in chains, and we are afraid to free the innocent lest they take revenge on us for their unjust prosecutions. Our greatest fear should be the erosion of freedom and democracy from within because of our own cowardice.
I agree with you, TriPolar, in the abstract. And you’re certainly correct that too much information stirs the cauldron of fear-mongering, and we are drowning in that cauldron.
But, for example, an individual past middle-age with a deteriorating health condition who knows his job is ending has a realistic, specific fear about his personal future. To me, most of these examples were quite personal.
That was beautiful. Still, the interviewer asking about fear did kind of lead the stories. Humans of New York does that better, in just letting people tell what’s on their mind.
I recently saw a Dutch street interview, where the reporter just held a microphone to people while nodding encouragingly. Not asking any question. I loved what people came up with under those circumstances. The here-and-now, light quality of those answers.
“This is my friend, she’s not my sister but she’s like a sister to me. We’re going out for coffee on market day. And groceries. My husband says: you call that going for groceries, when you spend all your time drinking coffee? But we like that”.
“What? Is this about the market square? You like it? It’s a beautiful square, isn’t it? I think so. I was on the city council committee who designed the market square, back in 2000”
“I’m just browsing here, actually. To be honest, most stuff at the market is not the best quality. Stores have better quality. But it’s fun browsing stalls, I think”.
I can’t argue with this part. I feel for people in that position, I am closer to it than I am comfortable with. I have my own health problems but will be okay. If something happens to my wife also then things would get worse but not terrible, but if something serious enough happens to both of us things could get very bad. Many people in this country are in that position, and not just from health concerns. Merely losing a job could reduce someone’s economic status permanently, even if they find a new job they may find themselves on a lower rung and never be able to regain they’re previous position. Many people are very concerned that they can’t do for their own children what their parents did for them. People also perceive increasing crime and terrorism even though those issues exaggerated by the media, real problems like lead in the water in Flint, and then there are those deplorable types that just don’t like to see people they don’t like doing better.
Some of this fear is real, but I still think the fear is in itself a problem. It’s too easy to complain and commiserate instead of the more difficult task of finding solutions. And that problem doesn’t just lie with the fearful, it’s also a problem for those who believe they are secure and don’t need to find a way to improve the conditions of those who aren’t.
I do basically agree with you. And if this were a different kind of society, some of those fears wouldn’t be so scary. I mean, shit just happens, but shit happening with no kind of personal, social, or societal safety net is really scary.
Complaining, commiserating and finding solutions aren’t mutually exclusive.
This. Especially when it’s linked with the belief that somehow if you have these problems and these fears, you brought them on yourself. And it can never happen to me.
That 89 year old guy in Maine with the big beard, 11 years ahead of me, pretty much sums up my thoughts. Long ago, I made a conscious decision to refuse to let fear drive my life. All the things I’ve been warned to fear since Cleveland won the world Series, turned out to be things that I and most other people managed to survive intact. Or just went away by themselves and did no more harm than the Soviet nukes. I wish things in the world would not go the way I suspect they will, but there is nothing to be done about it and most people, nearly all, will adapt.
Filmmaker Adam Curtis has a documentary called Hypernormalisation that touches on what some have mentioned here. From the official description:
[QUOTE=BBC on Hypernormalisation]
We live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed - they have no idea what to do.
This film is the epic story of how we got to this strange place. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them.
It shows that what has happened is that all of us in the West - not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves - have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us we accept it as normal.
[/QUOTE]
I haven’t watched it yet (it’s in line with a lot of other stuff ahead of it), but it is semi-free on the web. Living in a world of imagined fears does seem to cultivate a tendency to inflate intimate, personal fears, and a lot of us do seem to focus on that to the detriment of joie de vivre. But then, they say the slightly depressed have the most accurate views of the world, so… look out behind you!
Thanks for sharing that. I think every generation has their fears and uncertainty. My grandparents’ generation feared religious persecution and starvation and fled to the U.S., my parents’ generation were fearful of polio and the communists, my generation nuclear Armageddon and AIDS, my kids probably terrorist attacks. But, each generation survived, and thrived in spite of these real threats and fears, and so will my kids, and their kids.
At my work people are fearful of losing their job due to recent events. Thing is, the threats, the real threats (not imagined ones) are always there - I tell colleagues the threats are no more now than earlier, so let’s keep doing a good job - what we do best. It’s very easy to get sucked-down into a pessimistic hole and start feeding off one another. It’s harder, but more productive, to acknowledge fears, and find ways to stay positive, and offer people a hand-up out of the hole.
Sure Americans are fearful. They even *brag *about it. They go to horror films to be scared and boast about how afraid they are. Clickbait ads talk about giving you nightmares -and people click on them. They seek out reasons to be scared.
I don’t understand why anyone wants to feel that way. Dear is the mind-killer.
Deliberately seeking out fear or putting yourself in a situation where you will be terrified for a relatively short period of time and then it will end gives you the illusion that you have some control over the things that scare the shit out if you. Like baiting the bear that’s chained up or behind bars.
I don’t like being afraid. Hate horror movies. Not into fear-inducing recreational activities. Ordinary life is scary enough (and getting scarier).
That Hypernormalisation film does have good content, archive footage and music - but I found that Curtis was rather trying to shoehorn everything into his over-arching thesis, which wasn’t too convincing.
My mother was afraid that she would die and no one would know it … she died in a nice clean hospital bed and the nurse called me at 3am in the morning.
Faith and fear are a lot alike … in the small amount of time that it takes to replace each other, they are just alike.
I saw a bit about a “topic of discussion” said to be taking place among Jewish Israelis:
“What would we do if somebody treated us like we treat the Palestinians?”
Maybe Americans have a fear that all those “excursions” around the world makes us fear that our victims will retaliate.
It seems our unquestioning support of Israel - no matter how they acted (and they are not nice) just may come back to bite us.
For many, many years, not only the Government, but the Media as well, portrayed “Palestinians” and “Arabs” as sub-humans who should be destroyed if they get “uppity”.
To this day, how many do not know of Sunni v Shi’ite?
Where are they located?
Why do Iran and Saudi Arabia hate each other?
The difference in languages?
That Iranians are not Arabs?
The US has long held “Who gives a f*ck!? Kill 'em all and let God sort it out”.
Maybe some fear is justified.
But yanking chains just to sell newspapers/click-through’s has been all too common.
The GOP just won a historic election by trading on people’s fears.
I’m not too impressed by a photog deliberately evoking fear.
But it generates lots of click-through’s, doesn’t it?
The photo essay did not strike me as intending to evoke fear. I saw it as showing people that we all fear similar things, or that other people fear the same things you do, or conversely, look at how secure and blessed you are because you don’t have to worry about these things. When you’re really afraid, you can feel like no one else knows what you’re going through. For some, knowing that others have suffered and are suffering in the same way is a bit of comfort. For other people, knowing that is no comfort at all.
Re “click-through’s” – Every time you use an apostrophe to make a word plural, a puppy dies.
