What is your greatest fear? Mine is heights. I confronted this fear by taking hiking classes and walking to the edge of cliffs and standing there cheering triumphantly. Watching the news will expose you to all sorts of new ways to know fear.
Don’t eat peanuts (and now pistachios). Don’t walk across the street because someone will hit you and toss you off the hood. Don’t hang out in anyone’s house that smokes since there is this new 5th hand smoke that can get you. North Korea now has a rocket that can hit the West coast. Don’t ski on bunny slopes without a helmet as you may get brain swell. Don’t drive because someone will t-bone you. What do you do in this dangerous ass world?
Nothing.
Keep doing what you do. It makes no sense walking around afraid of the world. The news is meant to not inform everyone about news in the world, but to make you dependent on fear. We live in a culture of fear that makes no sense to me. I remember hearing that humans are the only creatures that can make ourselves afraid. If Jesus fell from the sky right now and said, “Take my hand and you will live in peace forever…” we’d still be afraid and skeptic. “Can I bring my jacket with me?”
On the news tonight I cant remember there being one good thing mentioned unless you follow a sports team. Everything is just bad ass news. I want everyone to stop watching the news for a week and see how good you feel. I end up catching it on accident as background noise. But for the rest of the week I will shut it out. Let’s see how this goes.
Rockets.
4 comments:
I'm no fan of Michael Moore, but I think he made a very good point when he said in one of his interminable documentaries that America has a culture of fear. All your media, even your advertising industry, is about fear. Fear of illness, poverty, being a victim.
It reminds me of one of your earlier posts about how people get nervous if a Black guy is walking behind them. I've lived in a few different countries, and have always felt reasonably comfortable sharing a public space with unknown Black men. Except in the US. This became really evident to me when I was visiting friends in Boston for a few days while living in Toronto. Although happy to stop and chat with anybody and everybody at any time of day in Toronto, including groups of Black guys who'd be hanging around corners near my apartment and chatting up passing girls of an evening, I was TERRIFIED when walking along the Boston Common area just before dark in case one of the Black guys (who were just walking around, being Black and generally minding their own business) looked at me. I have no idea why. Maybe it's something in the air. Really though, I thinking I was picking up on that constant vibe of racial fear that permeates America.
It's begun to infiltrate Irish and British culture a bit now, 24 hour news has a lot to do with it, I think. But we still don't have that fear that seems to have soaked into the bedrock of American culture. Thank goodness.
The thing is, horrible things happen, and apart from taking reasonable precautions, there's nothing you can do about it. We need to learn to live with the lack of control.
As for my personal biggest fear, it involves water and heights. Friends of mine have suggested I get over this by visiting Dún Aengus, an ancient Celtic fort now precariously balanced on the edge of a cliff on an island off the west coast of Ireland. A popular thing to do is crawl right up to the edge of the fort and look down into the Atlantic crashing into the coast and taking lumps out of the cliff.
http://image10.webshots.com/10/7/92/33/145879233lcTbVD_fs.jpg
Funnily enough, this pic doesn't freak me out as much as I think it should (probably because I always imagine myself clinging to the ground with every inch of skin, even those inches not actually designed for clinging) but I always worry that if I do ever work up the courage to do this, that my glasses will fall off... :?
Its nice to know that I'm not the only one that fears my glasses falling off over something high. I think about it when I look over the Santa Monica Pier. I imagine diving over and grabbing my glasses then looking up like "I could have just bought another pair..." right before I splash.
As for the fear of Black guys, I mentioned in that "Ask A Black Guy" thread how Blacks notice that kinda thing and react to it. No one likes feeling like everyone is scared of them.
I'm certainly not proud of my reaction in Boston, I felt like and idiot and a hypocrite, even at the time, and was very puzzled as it was in stark contrast to my behaviour back 'home' in Canada. And I can't imagine how pissed off I'd be if I was constantly being seen as a threatening presence because of my race/colour.
As for the glasses/heights fear, my terror of water would prevent me from leaping in after them I think, but then I would be faced with the prospect of trying to clamber out of a crumbling stone fort on the edge of a cliff in a high gale while practically blind, and surrounded by an island-full of people who despise me for being an English speaker. I think I'm better off avoiding Dún Aengus, all things considered. (And possibly the Santa Monica Pier too, should I ever get to California.)
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