I don’t know how much this is true in other
countries, but I know in America, we are very well trained to be afraid – of
EVERYTHING.
I know many people who think they aren’t afraid,
and I have to say, "then they don’t know what fear is."
For many people I’ve spoken to, particularly
men, fear means that your adrenaline is rushing, your heart is pumping, your
knees are shaking, etc., but that is only one level of fear. Fear is something that most of us experience
all day long, every day – it’s such a normal state of being, that we don’t
recognize it as fear, and it prevents us from feeling safe in a variety of
ways.
We have to be afraid of strangers, afraid of
drugs, afraid of guns, afraid of not having guns, afraid of the government,
afraid of our neighbor, afraid of dogs, afraid to help others, afraid of our
food (fat is bad, meat is dangerous, etc.), and afraid not to eat that same food
(fat is good, meat is good for you, etc.).
We are afraid to parent our children (spank,
don’t spank, reward, don’t reward). We
are afraid to speak to our boss, our coworkers, our spouses. No matter what we do, we’re going to get it
wrong. We might just buy the wrong soda,
the wrong diaper, the wrong brand of clothing…and then we will be ostracized,
unloved, unacceptable.
Everything is something to not do, or to be
afraid to not do. We are very much
trained through fear to NOT do things …only we can’t make up our minds on what
is and isn’t something to be afraid of, what to not do. We aren’t clear if something is good or
bad. We should be afraid of other
countries, other religions, other colors of skin, but we should accept everyone as a
friend without judgment because if you don’t, you’re a bad person.
We have to fear our own sexuality (we are often
very uncertain about our own ability to be “good” and acceptable in this
regard), and let everyone else be fine with theirs, while we are afraid that
they will harm us, our children, our families, and corrupt our country if they
don’t believe and think like we do. We,
of course, are never the problem, it’s always someone else’s fault, someone
else’s doing – and thus we fear anyone different from us. Loving someone can be a crime of immense
proportions (if someone doesn’t like whom we choose to love).
Pornography gets more graphic, more addictive,
more available than ever before…because we fear having appropriate sexual
outlets, and we fear sex, and we fear not having sex, and we fear that we are
sexual beings, and we fear love, and we fear acceptance, and we fear lack of
judgment…and so on, and so on.
We fear that we are bad people, we fear that
someone will discover that truth about us and that we will no longer be worthy
of love. We fear to love others because
they will break our hearts, we fear to trust, and we fear being afraid.
It’s very important in this world to be afraid
of climate change, and pollution, and also to be afraid of the solutions to
climate change and pollution.
We have to be afraid of not having enough money,
and be afraid of having money because money is evil, and rich people are evil,
but it’s important to want to be rich, and successful because we are afraid of
being normal, and ordinary.
We are afraid of being dirty, and afraid of
being too clean. We have to fear “superbugs,” and the antibiotics that cure
us. We have to fear cancer, and disease,
and all the foods, medications, and mindsets that cause cancer and disease
(which changes regularly). We are afraid
to not be healthy, and we are so afraid of the world, so filled with stress and
anxiety, that being healthy in this regard is nearly impossible.
Many of us have spent our whole lives in
fear. The world is always about to end,
whether it’s the apocalypse, a Russian nuclear warhead, the bees dying off, or
the volcano in Wyoming…We need to know that life as we know it could end at any
moment, we are not safe.
A woman cannot walk the street alone; she might
get raped, mugged, or murdered. Parents
cannot let their children go out to play, someone might kidnap them and sell
them into slavery. Everyone has to be
afraid of candy from strangers, even if we are the one handing it out. Everything we buy from the store has a
tamper-proof seal just incase someone wants to poison it.
We are told to seek power, and that power
corrupts. We are shown that there are
heroes (whom we may also have to fear).
Even heroes are often villains; fighting the enemy (whom we must fear,
even if we loved them yesterday), and each other.
We can’t trust anyone, because everyone lets you
down eventually. Politicians, lawyers,
car sales men, they’re all corrupt – but then we must also fear doctors, police
officers and those that are supposed to keep us safe.
We must fear for our lives every time we step
out our doors, and probably while we’re inside too – the building could catch
fire, someone may come in and rob and murder us.
We need to always be on alert, always
afraid. There is no safety in the world,
not anywhere, and not in anything…everything could kill us, from a gun to a
banana peel, from a stranger to our child, from a mouse to a thunderstorm. We are never, ever safe.
We cannot undo the fear by telling each other
not to be afraid, or by telling each other all the same things we’ve been
saying for eons; fight it, ignore it, let it go, take deep breaths, come to the
realization that it isn’t real, change your mind, think happy thoughts, and so
on.
If we want to stop the fear, we have to solve
the problem. Much like solving the
problem of being hungry by eating food, and meeting the need that caused the
hunger. To stop fear we will have to start looking at the need that causes the fear, and
fill the need.
We will have to stop seeing fear as the enemy, a lie, a bad thing, and start to see fear as an ally, a friend that tells us, and motivates us, to
fill a need. We will have to start with
learning how to fill our needs without creating more fear, for ourselves or
others. We will have to learn what a
true need is. We will have to learn how
to neither be, nor ask another to be a sacrifice for our needs.
We have much to learn about fear so that it can be a part of us that is loved and accepted, which is necessary for us to be fully loved and accepted.
When we learn to work with our fear, instead of
against it, we will become the heroes we were born to be, and together we will start
a heroic revolution.
