This was written in the summer of 2006 and a bit random. I haven't been around dkos lately. I really needed a break from news and information, but I felt compelled to come back. I'm not exactly current on news from Iraq because of that, but this was inspired by Iraq and Katrina and he who shall not be named. I hope Obama takes care of war for us, but I'm still fearful for our future.
This is about fear. More after the fold.
Fear is on my mind a lot these days, on many levels. There is the Politics of Fear, the never-ending reminder by the powers that be how vulnerable we are to terrorism. Whether or not we feel threatened, or that this has any basis in reality is irrelevant, we still have to endure the barrage. Not all of it comes from the chirping and pillaging classes. Some of it comes from our fellow citizens, who fall for what the television tells them is true.
There is the fear of things we can’t possibly control, like weather. Will this be a bad year for hurricanes, and what impact will it have on the devastated lives along the gulf coast? If you’ve ever lived in a hurricane zone, you know there can be a fairly long, stressful process of watching a storm’s development unfold. It can take weeks for a system to cross the Atlantic. The NOAA releases an update every three hours, though sometimes it’s a little early. I used to get up at 2am and 5am just to refresh my browser when a storm threatened. Katrina was originally supposed to hook back east towards Florida (where I lived at the time), so I was watching it closely. So were my co-workers and fellow storm trackers. The first one to spot a new update shouted from the cube-farm – "Update’s in – its heading to New Orleans!" That was Friday at about 4:45pm. I called my Mom, it was the first heads up for her.
By Sunday, the fear was so palpable I could not type or write or dial a phone - I was shaking so bad. I’ve always followed hurricanes. I knew what this meant. Waiting for all that destruction. Not knowing my brother’s fate for four long days. When the flooding was finally reported late Monday, I cried all night, I knew how many people were going to die.
New Orleanians are very on edge this year (note – written in 2006, after Katrina). They don’t care so much about terrorism, though.
There is the fear of global warming and peak oil, threats so dire that it doesn’t surprise me that most people don’t care. They can’t handle the truth because the implications are so dark. So we all turn away and seal our fates.
There is the fear of fear. I have lived with panic attacks since my mid-teens. Panic is a horrible experience. Even though you know intellectually what is going on, you still feel like you are going to die or go crazy. Most days are fine, but enough of them are bad that I consider it a handicap because it limits what I can do in life. There are good-bad days and bad-bad days. On a good-bad day, my heart races, and I grind my teeth and take deep breaths and pray that I don’t freak out. On a bad-bad day, it feels like my mind leaves my body to die, I can barely feel my connection to the earth, and yet at the same time I’m exquisitely sensitive to the slightest stimuli. On a bad day, my heart doesn’t just race, it explodes, and I am convinced no heart can survive this onslaught, even if it is all in my mind. I have to take so much of my meds on a bad day, that when they finally kick in I can barely lift my head from the bed of my darkened room. Bad days are blessedly few and far between. I haven’t had one in several years.
Misplaced panic is the primitive brain doing its job, but the higher brain misfiring. When someone jumps out at you and yells ‘Boo’ – your first reaction is from the primitive brain. It processes signals much more quickly than the higher brain and tells your body it’s go time. Then the message makes its way through the higher brain, which realizes there is no threat and calls off the alarm. When you have panic, that higher brain function has the opposite effect – it knows how bad panic feels, senses the starting sensations, realizes the "danger" unfolding – the danger of a panic attack - and kicks off the fight or flight response.
Behavioral scientists say that you can train your mind not to react that way, and while I believe that is true if caught early (I had success in my teens with this approach), I think it’s too late now. Once you get into it this far there is no un-ringing that bell. It’s like forgetting the words to Happy Birthday to You – can’t happen. So I have my coping mechanisms and my diazapem in the case of an emergency and I deal with it. I’m not in any danger, and I have no right to complain. Life is good otherwise.
My favorite kind of fear is stage butterflies. Some people suffer genuine stage fright, which is a terrible experience, a phobia. I’m not talking about that here, I’m talking about the energy and jitters you get before going on stage, or taking the field. It’s the athlete bouncing up and down, the musician flexing fingers, the dancer stretching. I was a classical pianist, a ballet dancer, and did a little musical theater. I love being backstage, that moment when the house lights go down and the orchestra begins to play the overture to Sleeping Beauty or The Nutcracker. In that moment my soul soars, as I wait for my cue. This is healthy fear, and I am grateful for it. Not all of my fear mechanisms are irrational, and in that moment it’s so nice to appreciate, rather than dread, the feeling of adrenaline flooding my body.
None of these fears, however, can compare to real, genuine, on-the-ground, my-life-is-really-in-danger fear. I’m a fortunate person, I have not had that experience, but someone very close to me did and came very close to death, so I have some idea of what it is like. This is what is must be like to live in Iraq, or to live on the streets, or to live with an abuser. What a miserable state of being that must be. I don’t understand why our war-mongering leaders can’t fathom the reality suffered by the Iraqi citizens and the hostage US soldiers. Do they really think that the fear imposed is justified by the fear (of terrorism) they feel?