2022 May Blog by Chuck Peek
Why does a party that believes government has no business in regulating anything nevertheless push so hard on law enforcement? Isn’t government at heart a set of laws? If laws are unwelcome, then why favor enforcing them? And why a law about abortion if, as they reason around gun restriction, laws don’t change anything?
I posted some of this a few days ago on Facebook—just after I’d received an email informing me my Twitter account had been suspended. Its only use was to carry the links to my blogs, so I’m guessing my blog was offensive to Twitter or Elon or both. The cancellation was my latest entry into the competition with my son for which of us has the best “Been Cancelled” credentials. (His are a bit better so far, but I’m gaining.)
The Facebook post elicited comments, among them two from two people whose views I always listen to, Fr. Don Hanway, retired Rector of St. Mark’s on the Campus in Lincoln, and the Reverend Stephen Price-Gibson, former Pastor at Kearney’s First Presbyterian Church. Both of them took seriously the question I’d meant ironically, and both gave a short answer to the question. How could this anomaly be? Their answer: Fear.
Fear of just about everything: institutions, the current world as it is, people who lie and people who tell the truth, the supposed predations of supposedly undesirable people, the loss of the world they briefly thought briefly existed—1947-1953, before all these nasty things happened, before the white/male/rural world finally was drawn up short for its sins of omission and Brown v. Topeka said readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic were fine only if they were fine for everybody.
You can set the dates a little this way or that. You can argue that the Post WWII world was never more than a bubble that suited a few folks so well they thought they’d always lived in it and always would. You could note that Brown v. Topeka Board of Education had been planned decades before (and postponed by the Great Depression and WWII/Korea) or that the era really only ended years later in the era of assassinations—Abraham, Martin, John, and my old friend Bobby. But somewhere in the general time zone people mistook a very temporary and tenuous situation as their birthright and soon felt cheated of it.
Nothing has so marked this American life of the last 50 years as the feeling of both haves and have-nots that they have somehow been cheated out of their due.
And it is such a strange alliance—this shared feeling by billionaires and the poor marginalized folks they bilk, a nearly Stockholm-like syndrome in which the down and nearly out worship the ground the up and coming walk on—or golf on as may be the case.
That is the strange alliance of the fearful: those with the most to lose and those who are already next to losing everything—which explains the odd coalition on the right that let the Trump plague loose on America.
And just as Don and Stephen were responding about the national (and clearly in many ways international) pandemic of fear, I chanced on an interview with John Darnielle. John Darnielle is the singular of which Mountain Goats is the plural when it comes to indie music, though these days he’s back to singular as a novelist. Helen Rosner asked him a question similar to mine—the basic question we are all asking in some perplexity: Why? And this was Darnielle’s reply:
“I do think young people do practically everything out of fear, whether it’s fear of missing out, or fear of not becoming what you want to become, or fear of not getting away from what you want to get away from. If you keep working spiritually, you think, “Oh, wait, if I work and I’m able to provide for myself, what do I truly have to be afraid of?” Not so much. And, well, then you can approach something like freedom I guess.” (New Yorker Magazine blogs: Sunday April 24. “Helen Rosner interviews John Darnielle…John Darnielle Wants to Tell You a Story.”)
We’d just watched one of the latest episodes of NCIS when I read the whole interview, an episode in which a young girl gets conned by an older fellow who capitalizes on those very fears in her life. Darnielle’s commentary and the episode’s depiction both point to how much fear is governing so much of life today in America.
While I’m not much on touting how great America is in comparison to the rest of the world—plenty of which looks bad because of what we’ve helped do to it and another plenty of which look a lot better when you see the real comparison clearly—but there are certainly metrics that should assure most of us that, despite the real dangers of the world, this is the safest country, the most powerful country, the country least beset by a host of ills that many other countries are forced to find normal.
However, we often confuse our weaknesses with our strengths. Locally, we have a corner business where the wag who runs it often puts up a witty sentence on the signboard. One sample: My wife says I never finish anyth. You drive by, you laugh. But lately his sentence tells us Musk is spending his own money; the government is spending ours.
That’s just backwards. Musk is spending money that an economic system (plus many economic favors) has taken from all of us and handed to him; meanwhile, the government is us, it is us spending our own money. What happens in a country where we are led by the Musks of the world to think the government is “them” taking from “us”? We are back to so many of us being so afraid of so much so often.
But what story of us does that fear tell? A world of mine, mine, mine will inevitably be a world of fear, fear, and more fear. And then, these fears are intensified when someone is always trying to scare us (and spending lots of money to do so). People who will benefit from our fear are always going to try to make us afraid. That’s the deliberate work of demagogues in our midst, persistently and methodically scaring us with fantasies and falsehoods.
While the world in which I was raised pretty much told us that there were no monsters in the closet or under the bed, powerful and well-funded forces now tell us there are monsters everywhere. All the hullabaloo about land grabs and school health standards and the so-called CRT, not to mention how a G6 network will activate our booster shots and turn us into internets—all of this in order to whip up an organized onslaught of fear mongering. And, then, pointing a finger to scoff at anyone who dares show us that, again, the emperor is naked.
Maybe popular culture saw this coming a long time ago. Who remembers these lyrics?
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from this tropic port
Aboard this tiny ship.
The weather started getting rough,
The tiny ship was tossed,
If not for the courage of the fearless crew
The Minnow would be lost, the Minnow would be lost.
Now this is the tale of our castaways,
They’re here for a long, long time,
They’ll have to make the best of things,
It’s an uphill climb.
source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/gilligansislandlyrics.html
But, as Job knew, it is our own worst fears that eventually are realized. Enough fear among enough people will create the very thing we need to be afraid of…even if it never was there before the fears were aroused and exploited.
Today, if you are part of the Minnow crew, you will be roundly attacked for, well, for acting like a crew; maybe it is unfair to equate a tropical port with Mar Lago…but maybe it’s not such a stretch. It’s pretty certain, though, that we are in for an uphill climb. It is easier to destroy a culture than to rebuild it after fear-mongering has undermined faith in its foundations. The damages our governor has done to our state will not be undone overnight and we are just one state.
Just one final note on what story our fears seem to write about us. As a Christian writer, I’m obliged to write within the dreadful scandal of particularity that lies at the heart of Christianity. That particularity places Jesus front and center. In this case, not the Jesus many fundamentalists believe came to help them get rich, but the Jesus who teaches that perfect love casts out fear.
So, if fear now abounds, isn’t it a sign that we’ve pretty well pushed love so far to the side we can barely recognize it when we see it? In, for instance, the minority communities who have stuck with America despite how they’ve been treated, in the medical community that has fought so valiantly to protect us from ourselves during that other pandemic, in the teachers who still believe their work is not to protect students from the hard facts of history, in the performers and professionals who kept on finding ways to represent clients or entertain audiences despite closures.
Dostoyevsky felt that to lose sight of God would end in making good seem evil and evil seem good. Dr. Fauci becomes a villain and Elon Musk becomes a hero. Doesn’t that describe a lot of what plagues us these days? That itself might be frightening, but it is not a call to be afraid…it is a call to choose love…to choose love (to paraphrase Wesley) whenever we can, wherever we can, and as often as we can.
PS Three days after the notice of my Twitter suspension, I received a Tweet and was able to send one. Right after that, Elon put his bid for Twitter on hold. Guess he learned he couldn’t expunge me from the rolls and so lost interest—at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. (I may be gaining on you after all, George!)
Kearney, Nebraska
May 22, 2022
Next blog: Memorial Day Weekend—one of four annual posts of those recently lost, some our acquaintances, some known to the wider public.
capeek 