For years, they have spent all of their energies tearing us apart. And by us, I mean Americans in general. John Dean's book explores the studies that have been going on for decades regarding the effects of morbid thought on societies and whether an intensification of fear of death favors conservatives or liberals. I think we all know the answer to that question. Wasn't it one of Hitler's henchmen who said that all societies work the same? Tell the people they are being threatened and accuse the peacemakers of being unpatriotic and they'll follow you anywhere.
So, conservatives and their radical ilk, have been playing up the fear quotient for decades. Just think of eyewitness news, Megan Kanka, Polly Klaas, America's Most Wanted, genetically modified food, AIDS, HRT, everything that tastes good. We are constantly bombarded with negative shit that's going to kill us every freaking day. The problem is that most people can not estimate their own risk. They are irrationally afraid of nearly everything. It has gotten so bad that children now have to set up the evil "play dates" to interact with one another and even those rely heavily on the parents liking one another and teacher recommendations (I kid you not. It has gone that far.) The suburbs are quiet on a Saturday afternoon. The children are safely supervised 24/7 in a series of structured activities where their risks of physical injury or encounter with a stranger are reduced to zero. And never is heard a discouraging word on the soccer field, classroom or any where else. Anger is not permitted. It must be supressed in a developmentally appropriate way. We smother our kids with lessons. To be a child today is to grow up in a pretty prison of our parents making based on the ever present fear of a child abduction. Isolation is the result.
But it isn't only the children who are isolated. How many times have you said or have heard said to you, "I try not to make friends at work. When I go home, I want to leave work behind me." Pretty stupid considering we live 1/3 of our lives there. And we commute and we have lessons and games to ferry the children to. And other committments too numerous to detail. And we have to worry about paying bills, not gaining too much weight, whether our house is safe and now, after 9/11, terrorists.
Yes, the Bushies will not let us forget 9/11. I'm not saying we should. I'm just saying that it shouldn't be the first thing we think of when we get up in the morning. We shouldn't run our lives by being frightened all of the time. Because when you are frightened, you tend not to make good long term decisions about things. Good short term decisions, maybe. But fright just tends to drive out all the analytical capacities from our brains. It makes us fearful of our neighbors too. What if they don't want to defeat the men who want to chop off our heads? What if they are gay? They aren't like us at all. How can we trust what they will do if they aren't like us? And they don't go to church. What is going to stop them from chopping off our heads in our sleep if they don't have a set of commandments to prevent it?
Isolating.
And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is just where they want us. Isolated. Because if we are afraid of each other, we can never get together and drive them out. We will always wring our hands and say. "Well, I hate how things are going but what can one person like me do to change it?" Fox is especially good at reinforcing learned helplessness. People are probably pretty PO'd about the state of things in the good old US of A but they feel powerless to do anything about it because as individuals, they fear retribution. And they do not trust their neighbors so they can't form a critical mass.
Enter DailyKos.
We came here initially because we were pissed, right? C'mon, admit it. You came here because your neighbors and coworkers loved Bush or were terrified out of their wits into voting for him and supporting the war and you were disgusted. Right? I know I was.
But once we got here, we discovered each other. We found that there were really very interesting people here on the blog. They are interested in science, art, politics, psychology, gardening. All those things we used to experience in the real world, were suddenly here again. We are a community. And then we went to YearlyKos and we found that we had underestimated ourselves. Let's face it, there was fear and trepidation in making those flight reservations, right? I didn't know who I was going to meet. Were they going to be as normal and ordinary as the NYC Kossacks I had met or were they going to be a bunch of twinkie eating, pasty faced geeks?
But we were all completely normal. Not left wing crazies, not unbalanced, not young and naive. But older, wiser, smarter, more humorous and kinder than any one of us could have predicted. Just the kind of people you want as neighbors.
And THAT is what they are afraid of. That is why Fox and Newsweek and David Brooks deliberately mischaracterize us. They don't want others to know how easy it is to find community. But the spin isn't working anymore. Because when new people come here, they see that we aren't what they said we were. Because we are perfectly normal Americans and we have found that there is power in a union. And the radicals in charge do not want anyone else to find this out. They want to sing about our schisms. They want to drive a wedge through us and tear us apart. They want to dance triumphantly over all of the little pieces that we are. But we have somehow escaped all of that and it is because of our dissent. It is because we are free to disagree. It is because we overcame our fear and met each other in person in Las Vegas and all across America.
That is what they fear. And that is how we win.