The Only Thing We Have to Fear

The Only Thing We Have to Fear …

By Christopher Platt

There was one scene in Michael Moore’s Sicko that I haven’t yet seen anything written on, but it sure rang my bell. It wasn’t something that bears directly on managed care, but it was a breathtaking comment, nonetheless. Moore asks a French person about their healthcare system, and the Frenchman says something like, “The difference is, here, the government is afraid of the people, but in the United States, the people are afraid of the government.” Wow! I thought. Isn’t that the truth? Here we are in the erstwhile “Land of the Free,” where the government wiretaps and otherwise eavesdrops on its own citizens, where people are reputed to be disappearing into foreign gulags, where habeas corpus is summarily suspended without a whimper from our legislators, and where we are told that speaking out against the war is the same thing as speaking out against and not supporting our troops. It’s NOT, by the way, but our government keeps telling us it is.

I began to consider whether Americans are afraid of their government – and there are many reasons we SHOULD be afraid … very afraid. There are certainly documented instances of people losing their jobs, or families, or their citizenship, sometimes even their lives, because they chose to speak out against our American government. Yet, despite the inherent dangers of standing up to this singularly repressive regime, people ARE speaking out, and, afraid or not, they are finally beginning to be heard. I think Moore’s Frenchman was wrong. Are we wary of those monsters in Washington? Sure. Afraid? Maybe not so much. Look around, not just here at Huffington, but at other Blog sites, other news and opinion sources, and you’ll see there’s a lot of dissent lately, and its getting louder, and more widespread, and even more – gasp! -- mainstream. It’s not just Keith Olbermann, anymore. Even the New York Times joined the growing drumroll of dissent, saying, “It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.”
In fact, I’d bet that a government that tries so hard to stifle dissent is more afraid of us than the other way ’round. What’s indisputable is, that it has desperately tried, for as long as I can remember, to MAKE us fearful, if not of itself than SOMETHING ELSE because, as advertisers and marketers know, FEAR sells even better than SEX. Fear is what sold us, albeit temporarily, on the Iraq War. Call it a bad impulse buy, if you will. And the FEAR campaign persists: Oh, if we don’t send our children to be blown up over there, the terrorists will follow us home … Oh, if you aren’t with us, you’re with THEM … Oh, I have a “gut feeling” (no hard evidence) that we’ll suffer a serious terrorist attack this summer. Heckuva job, Mikey!
Look, 50 years ago, some genius in our government came up with the “duck-and-cover” campaign. For those too young to remember, this was what our response as citizens was to be to save ourselves when the Russian atomic bombs were headed our way. As schoolchildren, we would leap up at the raucous sound of the air raid sirens, dive under our wooden desks, and cover our heads with our hands until the All Clear signal sounded. Did I live in fear then? You bet! Some of us, even as children, had seen film of the fiery devastation wrought by nuclear weapons, and here was our government, in the words of the imminent philosopher Lewis Black, “In the middle of a nuclear F**K attack, making me hide under kindling!”
The Orwellian approach is to keep the masses in a constant state of fear and anxiety. Why? Because, while we’re on our hands and knees, covering our heads, we can’t see what our government is up to – and we won’t be likely to dispute anything our government does in the name of protecting us. And we didn’t, for the longest time. But it wasn’t fear of the government as much as it was fear CAUSED by our government. So we Baby Boomers (and now you know the OTHER meaning for that appellation) grew up in a constant state of stress and anxiety. I’d be willing to bet real money that this was the time when the nation’s obesity, heart disease and cancer epidemics really began, not to mention our soaring cholesterol rates.
Okay, the Cold War ended, and our government had to come up with another thing for us to fear besides the commies. Hmmmm, let’s see. Can’t do space aliens, Hollywood already covered that. Can’t be African-Americans, or Catholics, or Jews – they’re all mainstream now, and we need their votes. Ahhhh, how about crime? Drugs? I know, how about terrorists? Everybody’s got some of them, and we can switch from nationality to nationality, ethnic group to ethnic group and religion to religion anytime there’s signs of Terrorist Fatigue! And they’re all coming here to challenge our way of life! Yikes!
Well, it worked, didn’t it? Because they were right! While we were hiding under our desks, a different breed of terrorists hijacked our government right out from under us. Now, we’re terrorized by our own government, and we can fear eavesdropping, wiretapping, imprisonment without trial (or even charges filed), or worse.

After 50 years of this crap, I, for one, am getting damn’ sick and tired of being told all the things I should be afraid of. I don’t need to hear one more time about the threat of terrorists following our troops home. I don’t need to hear about unsubstantiated “gut feelings,” either. Ho-Hum! But I suspect the “gut feeling” gambit was trotted out last week because with all the threats, precious little evidence or proof has been exhibited to back them up, and they wanted to keep stoking the fires of fear. Fear is an amazing thing. Some people are very sensitive to it – perhaps overly so. I live in New York City – target of choice of any self-respecting terrorist. And when we come home at night to find the door triple-locked, chained and bolted, we ask, “What happened? Was there another apartment robbery in Phoenix (or Honolulu, or Miami, or Minsk) today?” Just shove our case of duct tape up against the door, will you?

And then there’s Ron Paul, one of the more-interesting presidential candidates, who was reported to have said the a few weeks ago that we should watch out for our government creating a contrived Gulf of Tonkin-like incident, to justify launching air attacks against Iran. Whew! Did he really say that? I’m not saying he’s full of it, mind you, but I wish he wouldn’t stoop to the same fear-mongering tactics of the guys he’d like to replace.

The sad thing is, these harbingers of doom, those war-loving guys with no military experience like Bush, Cheney, Michael “Guts” Chertoff, or Tailgunner Joe Lieberman, could be right. But, so what? What can we do to prevent it, anyway? I don’t hear of the people of Israel being told every day that terrorists are planning a major attack. Of course they are! They know it, and yet, somehow, they carry on through frequent, random carnage that we can’t even imagine here. So shut up, already! Remember the Chicken Little effect.

Moore’s Frenchman is wrong. We fear plenty, but we evidently still don’t fear criticizing our pathetic excuse for a government. And our government must still be afraid of us, too. Why else try so hard to distract us and shut us up? On the other hand, it’s hard to tell if it is afraid of us, or it’s just too stupid to know what the people will do if provoked beyond a certain point. There’s Congress, where I heard their recent, abysmal public-approval numbers dismissed by old-timers, who said, “Nobody ever likes us anyway, so what’s the difference?” And that sounds a lot like those guys atop the food chain in the Executive Branch (although some of them don’t know that’s where they are), who have never, ever, given a rat’s ass what the public thinks, and so have taken it upon themselves to try to consolidate power and shut out legitimate, lawful expressions of disagreement and disapproval. When our legislators say, as they have several times, that they won’t bother even trying to impeach these guys because they can’t see it leading to conviction, I’m thinking that stupid trumps afraid. And that’s scary.